Rob88
 lvl.4
Canada
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My P3 battery charging hub arrived today, so I thought I would post a few pics and provide my first impressions.
The charging hub is very nicely built and smaller than I thought it would be . . . small enough to throw in your case and carry with you. It connects to the charger that came with your P3 and charges up to four batteries, one at a time. It starts with the battery that has the most charge, getting you ready to fly as soon as possible.
If you look carefully at the pics below, you will see a warning printed onto the side of the unit, a warning that is repeated in the instructions . . . . "When charging more than one intelligent flight battery, distribute them as evenly as possible among the charging slots."
Unfortunately, DJI doesn't explain what they mean by as evenly as possible. See the pics below for an example using two batteries . . . all four examples are distributed as evenly as possible, but which is correct, and why does it matter? Perhaps DJI could improve the instructions with reference to ports. For example, when charging one battery, use port x. When charging two batteries, use ports x and y, etc.
The other thing that would be nice to see is a choice between storage/maintenance charge, standby charge and full charge. The maintenance setting would allow you to leave four batteries on the charger forever, and keep them at the optimum level for long life. The standby charge would bring them up to 65 or 70%, so they are as close to ready as possible, without the risk of storing them at too high a charge (remember, it's not good to store these at 100%, and they will automatically discharge to about 65% at the programmed time). The final setting (top-up), would allow you to fully charge your batteries as quickly as possible when you are ready to go flying (basically starting at 65 or 70%, instead of 15-20%).
Obviously, it's easy enough to manually remove the batteries from the charging hub when they flash 3 lights instead of 4, and top them up when you are ready to go flying. But if you're going to manually monitor your batteries to charge them only to a certain percentage, you can do that already. The whole point of spending $90 on a charging hub (in my opinion) should be to allow additional, hands-free, automatic options, depending on when you next intend to go flying. . . . Putting the bird away for winter? Set it on storage/maintenance mode. Raining outside but planning to fly as soon as the skies clear up? Set it on standby mode. Want to go flying asap? Go from standby to full charge with top-up mode in minutes instead of hours.
Those are my initial thoughts on this product. Don't get me wrong . . . I'm very happy with my purchase and I'm not complaining. The charging hub is a well built and useful little item . . . but it only does one thing when it could easily do more. Perhaps future firmware updates will introduce additional functionality.
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