Splinter: a carbon upgrade for the Tiny Whoop class

The Splinter is one of the thinnest entries in this archive, and it is worth saying so plainly before anything else: no shop page, no photo description and no specification sheet for it survived the Wayback Machine's captures of mode-2.com. What survives is a single sentence, from the company's own open source frames page, describing what the frame was for.

What Mode 2 FPV said

The company described the Splinter as "designed to be a carbon fiber upgrade for the Tiny Whoop class of FPV drones." That is the entire documented description. It was released, like the rest of the company's frame line, under the GNU GPL v3.

• CategoryTiny Whoop class upgrade frame
• MaterialCarbon fibre
• LicenceGNU GPL v3

What "Tiny Whoop class" means

This section is general background on the category, not a documented fact about this specific frame, and the two should not be confused. Tiny Whoop began as the name for a specific tiny FPV racer built by strapping a camera and video transmitter onto a Blade Inductrix, a sub-100 mm brushed micro quad originally sold as a toy. The name expanded to cover the whole class of tiny, prop-guarded FPV drones it inspired: light enough to fly indoors and through gaps a larger quad cannot, and cheap enough that crashing one into a wall repeatedly is a normal part of how the class gets flown. Stock frames in that class are typically injection-moulded plastic, chosen for cost and for the way plastic flexes on an impact instead of splitting.

A carbon fibre "upgrade" frame for that class, in general terms, swaps that stock plastic for a stiffer material, on the logic that a stiffer frame holds its geometry better and can shave a small amount of weight, at the cost of some of the flex that lets a plastic frame survive a wall it hits dead-on. That trade-off is common across the whole aftermarket for this class of frame. None of it is a claim about how the Splinter specifically was built, how much it weighed, or how it actually flew: those figures do not survive, and this paragraph is context for the category the Splinter competed in, not a description of the part itself.

What is not documented

There is no surviving figure for the Splinter's size, weight, arm thickness, prop size compatibility, price or release date. No product photo description survives either. If you own a Splinter and are trying to confirm you have the genuine Mode 2 FPV part, this page cannot help beyond confirming the name existed and what the company said it was for.

The design files were named as living on GitHub and Thingiverse; only the Thingiverse profile can be linked with any confidence: thingiverse.com/mode2fpv/designs. No GitHub repository URL was captured, and this page does not guess at one.

For the rest of what Mode 2 FPV released under the same licence, see open source frames or the archive overview. For how frame material and stiffness are chosen today, see frames.