The Diatone Mamba F4 Nano Stack (134) is a 16x16mm flight controller stack that support 2S to 4S LiPo voltage input. Build quality looks awesome!

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I have the chance to test the Mamba F4 FC/ESC stack from the Diatone Cube micro quad I recently reviewed.

Where to Buy?

Product Page: http://bit.ly/2KABuEk

Accessories to be confirmed.

Closer Look at the Diatone F4 Nano Stack

First off, here are the specs of the flight controller and 4in1 ESC:

• FC Processor: F411
• FC Gyro: MPU6000
• Betaflight OSD
• 5V 1.5A BEC
• Input Voltage: 2S – 4S Lipo
• Betaflight Firmware Target: MAMBAF411
• ESC Firmwrae: BLHeli_S
• ESC Current Rating: 12A-13A? Continuous, 15A (10S) Burst
• ESC Protocols: PWM, Oneshot, Multishot, Dshot600
• Mounting holes: M2 16x16mm
• Size: 22×22×5.2mm
• Weight: 5.5g

This is a two-board stack – F4 FC on top and a 13A 4in1 ESC at the bottom.

Diatone will release a VTX adapter board specifically for the TBS UNIFY PRO32 NANO VTX, which will sit on top of the FC. I’ve asked them to develop a similar board for the more affordable Eachine Nano VTX, hope they will consider it.

This is what the VTX adapter board looks like. The VTX can be soldered directly to the board, which has 16x16mm mounting holes so you can mount it on top of the FC. It doesn’t bring anything special to the table, simply a neat solution for mounting your VTX.

The connections between each board, e.g. the VTX and FC, are through silicone wires. This is in my opinion a better way than using “push pins” like the iFlight Succex F4 Micro stack we only just reviewed.

Yes, soldering wires is more work to set it up the first time, and perhaps harder when repairing, but it minimizes the vibrations that can be transferred from the frame to the gyro. And it’s also more robust against crash impacts.

For soft-mounting, Diatone went for their iconic plastic o-rings paired with M2 steel bolts. We saw the same from their full size and mini size Mamba F7 stacks.

These o-rings works reall well for reducing vibrations getting to the flight controller, and it’s very flexible when it comes to adjusting the space between boards, by simply inserting more or fewer o-rings. The only downside though is when you take the stack apart, it can be quite a mess! And be careful don’t lose them in the carpet or you will never find them again.

The FC and 4in1 ESC are also connected with soldered silicon wires to maximize the effectiveness of soft mounting.

Receiver Setup

Frsky

There are only 2 UART ports, which is limited. But this is kind of normal on 16x16mm stacks. It just means if you are using SBUS and SmartAudio to control your VTX, you won’t have SmartPort Telemetry. The best solution is probably to use FPort so you can get both SBUS and Telemetry through the same wire :)

Alternatively you can also remap the PPM pad to a Softserial Port, and connect SmartPort to it. Here is a tutorial to give you an example how it works.

Simply go to Betaflight CLI and enter:

resource PPM 1 NONE
resource ESCSERIAL 1 NONE
resource SERIAL_TX 11 B09
resource SERIAL_RX 11 B09
save

Setting ESCSERIAL 1 to NONE because it also occupies the pin B09. Setting it to none shouldn’t be an issue.

Other Notes

The Diatone Mamba F4 Nano Stack is a few dollars more expensive than the iFlight Micro stack, and specs are similar, but build quality of the Mamba looks amazing so I’d still consider it. Especially if you have OCD about soft-mounting, the Mamba stack is probably preferable.

Here is the pin-out diagram of the Diatone Mamba F4 Nano FC:

There are buzzer pads, but no RSSI pad. and no flash memory for blackbox.

There is conflicting info on the product page, the specs say ESC rating is 13A but the images says 12A.

Diatone will in the next revision break out both RX2 and TX2 pads on the board, giving you access to the full UART2 without resource remapping.