Eachine Tyro79: Build tips, Setup and Review

The Eachine Tyro79 is the second in Eachine's Tyro series, the first being the budget Tyro99 5 inch quadcopter kit. The most astonishing thing about this quadcopter kit is it's price - it is only $79 for a 3" kit. Clearly there have been areas where Eachine have cut costs but they've made a suprisingly good quad given those compromises.

Update: Due to the popularity of this review I have just completed an ultimate upgrade guide for the Tyro79 here. This covers all parts and betaflight upgrades.

What's in the kit
It's a surprisingly complete kit, including all the essential plus many extra that a builder may want - zip ties, spanners, silicon pads, multiple straps etc - it's all here and listed below. The parts you would expect are in black, the parts you probably would not are in red

• 1 x 140mm racing frame kit
• 4 x 1607 2800KV brushless motors
• 1 x 4 IN 1 20A BLHeli_S ESC
• 1 x  F4 flight controller
• 1 x 700TVL CMOS camera
• 1 x 5.8G 40CH 0mw/25mw/200mw switchable VTX
• 4 x 3030 4-blade propellers
• Zip ties
• 2 x different length battery straps
• Silicon battery pad
• Carbon Fibre landing pad to protect battery
• spare JST connectors and cables
• Spare Prop Nuts
• 2 x spanners

If this is your first quad you will need some extra gear to get flying:

• A receiver (I recommend the XM Plus)
• Batteries 4s 550mah - 750mah (I recommend CNHL 4s 650mah or CNHL 4s 850mah)
• ​Propellers (I recommend Gemfan 3052)
• A transmitter (I recommend FRSKY Taranis X-Lite as reviewed here)
• Goggles (I recommend Skyzone SKY03O as reviewed here)

The build process.
I wont repeat the build process here, AndyRC did a fantastic job in his videos but I will provide some recommendations and tips based on challenges I found during the build.

I'll mention the motor wire soldering because it was a little more challenging than regular silicon motor wires. Be patient, and keep the heat on only as long as needed.

This image to show that how the cables are connected - ESC is connected, VTX is the other one on the left and receiver on the right

All components connected and funtioning correctly except the receiver - more on that below.

VTX is very easy to connect with pre-prepared harness

Here's my beef!! Something in the receiver connecter or wire was faultly. After much testing I direct soldered the receiver to the board as above and it worked just fine. Be wary!

Just under 154g all inclusive except battery. Note I've changed props for Gemfan 3052. Can't recommend using the stock props even for test fitting, they are just awful. Gemfan 3052 by contrast are excellent.

Betaflight Setup
Since there was no real customisation worth keeping I chose to upgrade to the latest betaflight and start settings from scratch. Receiver is in UART 1 and smart audio on UART 2. For PIDS I chose stock with I-term increased 50% on roll, pitch yaw since I-term relax was on. Dynamic filters on as per default. Increase gyro/pid loop to 8k/8k and that's about it.

Initial thoughts on the build pre-flight
After the setup and build I thought that the motors were just awful. They had horrible wires with acrylic insulation and laminations on the wire itself making it a bit of a pig to solder, certainly compared to regular silicon insulated motor wires. Furthermore the bearings sound horrid when idling. How did this translate to flight? It didn't, it actually flew a lot better than I was expecting. When I first saw the specifications I thought the motors were ridiculous - much too big of a stator and a ridiculously low kV even for 4s. Well the kV combined with a larger 1606 stator is actually fine offering resonable power on 3s and 4s with suprisingly good efficiency... more on that below. It does pay for it a bit in weight but not as much as I though it would.

3s performance
Just to get the ESC warmed up I started with 3s batteries, particularly the awful betafpv 850mah packs which just have a riduculously low c value. For a reasonably large capacity these were just unflyable in my Fullspeed leader 2.5 as reviewed here. I was then pleasantly surprised to find that not only did I get decent battery life with these in the tyro79 (4-4.5 minutes with fairly heavy throttle), I also had more power than I was expecting and certainly enough for a beginner to get to grips - enough to recover from big dives, power loops etc. If you already have 3s packs between about 450mah and 850mah I would recommend using them but if you are buying new please just go for 4s even if you are a beginner: read on...

4s performance
After I was comfortable that the build was sound on 3s I went for 4s (I used the CNHL ministar 4s 650mah which I can recommend). Everything felt sharper and faster and the speed was much improved. The best improvement however was the response: the ability of the quad to react more rapidly to stick inputs. I would recommend that even for beginners you go straight for 4s with this quad. There are easy ways to limit throttle like I wrote about here in order to hone your skills, lessen the chance of accident damage and make your flights last longer. I just wanted to point out again that between the noisy bearings, odd stator size and kv choice that these motors would be a disaster but combined with the rest of the package here are surprisingly good. I still have concerns about longevity and crash resilience but at time of writing I am 60-odd packs in and have yet to encounter and issue. beyond broken props and 1 x broken battery strap - very much consumable items anyway.

FPV performance
Now this is where I have confusing results. On the first 30 or so flights the camera was adequate - I could see colours fine but more importantly the transitions from light to dark were quite manageable. This can be seen in the DVR below.

I cannot remember if there was a crash or some event but since then the light handling has been awful - I cannot see in shadows at all, I can only fly on very sunny days with no clouds. Cloudy days blow out the image and make it practically unflyable.

This is interesting to me because these help explains the contrasting reviews I have watched. AndyRC had results similar to my first 30 packs - adequate light handling and colour reproduction whereas UAVfutures has the same as my next 30 - practically unflyable. I would suggest the buy should be aware of this likely issue and think if spending another $15-20 on a good camera like the Foxeer Razer or Foxeer Arrow Micro Pro would steer you towards another quadcopter. Maybe, maybe not... with a good camera it is not a bad little quad - not perfect but not as bad as the price might suggest.

Conclusions and recommendations
There's no doubt that at retail price the tyro79 is MUCH less than anything similar although it does come with some clear caveats

1. It is a kit that needs to be assembled compared with most other plug and fly quadcopters and
2. It also comes with a unreliable/disappointing camera.

Personally I prefer the kit solution because I have the tools (which you will need anyway) and I do like building myself. The camera is that bad IMO that you need to budget at $10-$20 for a replacement (I recommend the foxeer arrow micro pro). This still makes it cheaper than other similar models at full price but it does close the gap so you need to consider that, especially when sales and coupons are available. That aside, it performs surprisingly well on 3s and 4s and for the money it's hard to argue against any more than this.

​Thanks for reading, if you found this article useful please feel free to like or share, the facebook links below directly link/like this article. Links are affiliated and help me buy the bits I need to produce this type of content.

Update: Due to the popularity of this review I have just completed an ultimate upgrade guide for the Tyro79 here. This covers all parts and betaflight upgrades.

Spare parts linked below:

1607 motor

Baseplate

Full frame

2-4s ESC

f4 FC

VTX

Camera but dont recommend

Cable set

Standoff set

Screw set

Frame side plates

Upper plates

Carbon side plates

Foxeer razer micro

CNHL 4s 650mah battery