RichJ53
Captain
Flight distance : 1837356 ft
United States
Offline
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Dave,
We have the mystery of the batteries dropping for no reason right? There have been many posts including me regarding battery problems.
So, I set out to see if I could duplicate the sudden battery drop.
Okay, I set three (3) fully charged batteries aside for three weeks without touching them. All of these batteries are set for 10 days on the App regarding the auto discharge cycle assuming this is controlled by the intelligent battery chip and firmware.
First I checked each battery by pushing the power button to see the status of each one. I got three solid green LED's and the fourth one was blinking. Based on the LED's each of them looked the same.
The next thing I did was to install one of the batteries into my inspire 1, then set up my remote and IPad. Turned on everything and then connected. Looking at the battery screen in the GO App my first battery was showing 80% charge, about 3.98 volts per cell . Now I started the Inspire while leaving the battery page open on my screen to watch. Put the bird into a 10 foot hover and cycled the gear up. The progress bar said I had about 10.20 minutes of flight time and everything was looking good. I decided to lower the landing gear just to be safe and continued to watch the battery as it went to 76%. (pretty boring stuff right) one minute, started on the second minute and everything was fine. I was playing with the camera gimbal and cycled the landing gear again up and then back down at about 1 minute and 15 seconds into the flight and right.... then at about 1 minutes and 21 seconds the battery dropped without warning to 5% the red LED was flashing and the inspire was landing in only seconds. I have the flight log to prove this (but not sure how to copy the file yet). Pretty scary right. So I shut everything down and began getting my second battery ready to go.
Same process and started up the Inspire with the battery showing 76% bah bah bah... this time I did not even get the landing gear raised up. I watched the battery monitor and two of the six cells dropped within 35 seconds into the red. So I did not chance this one over a minute, set it down and shut it off. Funny thing is when the Inspire was setting on the ground motors off, the battery showed normal voltage (without load). Start the motors and the cells immediately dropped to undesired levels.
I put the final battery into the Inspire and this one acted differently than the other two. Started up with 80% battery and all cells were within about 3.98volts The progress bar showed11:44 minutes flight time. I flew this battery while watching the monitor and the cells were consistent and everything seemed to work fine. Keep in mind that I was not going to get carried away (just hovered in one place) I was able to fly this battery for 9 minutes and shut it down with 24% battery left showing. The flight power progress bar was consistent throughout the flight (not working very hard) and keeping it is a safe place for the experiment.
All of these batteries have worked well and no issues before the test and now I can see why we are hearing about sudden voltage drops from people using the tools we have in hand. If you just rely on the green LED's to tell us the battery condition it would be an mistake.
I always charge my batteries (top off) before I go to fly. It seems that the LED lights do not really show the state of the battery after it has been in the self discharge mode. Each battery has variable's that could be due to usage and useful lifespan. Temperature is another factor on total operational time.
ALWAYS charge your batteries before you start the flying session.
TB47 Battery #1 has 9 flights
TB 47 Battery #2 has 10 flights
TB 47 Battery # 3 has 3 flights
I will post some screen shots and the flight log once it get this off my iPad.
Thanks for your attention and I hope this will help us in some way.
Rich
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