PeteGould
Second Officer
United States
Offline
|
If you're the DP on a series of field shoots over several weeks, with a specific stock of batteries, do you want to beat on one battery over and over or do you want to distribute the usage more or less evenly? Every crew I have ever worked on/with would have said the latter. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
If you've been doing this for 40 years you have me beat by nearly a decade - I've only been at it for a bit more than 30. And of course batteries have evolved over the years. But whether they are nicads, nimh, lipo or some other chemistry, they remain a finite resource. You get so many charge/discharge cycles and that's it. So what's the best way of operating within that environment?
If I have, say, six batteries, and I want to ensure I continue to have six batteries that will all be ready to go and give me the performance I need, I probably don't want to beat on one or two of them and not use the others. I probably want to distribute the workload. You can do that by powering up using each battery in turn and looking at your mobile device, or you can mark the battery so you can see it immediately. Marking the battery will also alert you to failures in the firmware that you may not otherwise notice. If your marks say you have cycled the battery ten times, but the firmware says you've only done it six times, you're on notice that there may be an issue. That can be useful to know, and if you rely exclusively on the firmware, you may miss it. Is it a big deal? Probably not unless you're doing it for a living. But it IS a best practice.
Am I saying you have to do it? Hell no. ESPECIALLY not you, with four decades of experience. You'll do what you have found works for you over that career. But someone just starting out, who is looking for some good habits to get into, can evaluate this suggestion and see if it makes sense to them. If it does, great! If not, they should see what other ideas are out there that appear to make more sense. Or they can reinvent the wheel on their own. It's a free country.
I tend to agree with BOB that bringing lips down to zero is not a good idea. So do I. But remember - the firmware of the DJI battery adds a pad on the remaining charge that gets reported back. It will shut the battery off long before reaching an actual zero. That's the whole point of the firmware and the point that Bob is leaving out of the discussion.
|
|