Like many of you out there, I want the ability to record heated FPV racing in HD without compromising performance due to increased weight. There are several small HD/SD FPV camera systems out there now, but can they really be a viable solution to this dilemma. I sought out to answer that question in the most unscientific way possible.
The Setup (Caddx Turtle V1)
There are a few latency tests of the caddx that put it at about 33ms which seems on par with, say, a runcam micro swift 3 (at 23ms minimum and 33ms average). Seemed to me like a winner as I regularly run micro swift 3 on my race quads and am very happy. So here is how I decided to test it. I took 2 identically built Newbeedrone Flyby frames at 6s and flew them back to back on a night track. I felt like the night flying would bring out both the worst video quality and latency on both setups.
Here is DVR video of each cam side by side on the same track with my best respective lap times. (Sorry, no HD cause it's already all over youtube) I was honestly shocked at the results.
First off, I would like to point out how much worse the actual video you’ll see in your goggles is from the Caddx vs the Micro Swift 3. I did not adjust any settings on either cam, so both are stock. The quad with the Turtle had a Micro Swift 3 on it before and nothing but the cam was changed. It was a matter of adding the board and soldering 3 wires to the FC. I could deal with this quality difference if the performance was similar… It wasn’t.
This is where the Caddx became a “NO WAY” option for me as a racing camera.
The latency was awful. I mean really awful. I could actually see the time between me changing stick input and the video showing the result. I wasn't able to fly nearly to my normal precision and speed. I was over correcting, washing wide and going high on almost every turn. It was like using a Mobius as your FPV cam.
The Caddx may be good for freestyle in the daytime on a 3-inch quad, but for racing at night with tons of fast pilots, this will let you down. I would even say its a bigger setback that if you were to go from sbus back to ppm. I'm not sure if racing was the Caddx Turtle’s intended use, but it does not work for that. I recommend a DVR board still, for now.
Let's go micro split v2 :)