In August Team Black Sheep announced a new FPV racer on FPVlab.com, the TBS Gemini, a small hexacopter made for racing. It supposedly has a top speed of up to 100 km/h (~60 mph), is less than 400g light (~1 lb and a bit) and comes fully packed with all the FPV gear. Finally, the wait should be over soon. TBS just announced that the first batch started shipping. YESS! My order is also lined up and hopefully I can play with the little flying crab very soon.
Speaking of crabs. William Thielicke (aka Shrediquette) the designer of the Gemini, took some inspiration from horseshoe crabs to make the hexacopter crash resistant back in 2013 when he built the first prototype. You can read the full story on his blog or watch this little video, which shows the Gemini before he teamed up with TBS.
Until today, Shrediquette and TBS improved on several aspects of the Gemini including an open source Taulabs flight controller, custom made ESCs, the integration of the TBS CORE osd and a unified FPV video transmission system. Today the TBS Gemini is a ready-to-fly fpv racer with two battery options for normal flying (3S) and racing (4S). Here is my complete Gemini shopping list, without the FPV video receiver (googles or monitor) and minus the remote control (e.g the Taranis), which I already have.
- TBS Gemini kit
- 1 extra 3S battery in addition to the one included in the kit
- 2 extra 4S batteries for the extra kick
- D4R II 4-channel receiver to go with my Terranes
- Moebius camera for flight recording
- some spare propellors
So far only a few prototypes (photos) have surfaced online. Since the announcement in August and especially since the pre-order started mid October everybody is super excited to see how the Gemini performs. For me it will be the second multi rotor from TBS after the Discovery Pro. As there are no official Gemini videos out yet I would like to finish this article with some “unofficial” videos made with pre-production Geminis. I think this looks already pretty slick.