Need Some Advice or Help

[TheDroid]

Ok, I have posted this before but I am going to post again, because I am really stumped on this one. Every now and again when I go to fly my phantom 1.1.1, I have dual battery mounts for it and most times use 2 4000mah multistar batteries, when I plug in the batteries the light on the drone quickly flashes green then it flashes red contniously as if to say the batteries are low, and this is even after fully charging them, I have a Gruaupner balance quick charger. I have treid unplugging and replugging the batteries in and the same thing happens, I have tried plugging in the drone then the drones tx and I have treid turning on the drones tx and then the drone itself and still the same thing red light flashing all the time. I have plugged the phantom into the Naza assistant and no calibration is needed all the voltages look good. On my balance charger these are what each cell was displaying for voltages after trying to fly her last night. Battery(1) 4.15, 4.16, 4.09, Battery (2) 4.16, 4.16, 4.06. I don't see anything wrong with these numbers for each cell voltage unless someone sees differently. Also I have a DJI OSD and when the drone does this with the red light flashing, the voltage on the screen is good last night is was showing around 12.7 volts, the battery symbol was flashing which it does when indicating low voltage, the Satellite count was good around 8 satellites, so this tells me she is good to fly but I wont unless the light problem is solved, don't want her to come down when she is not supposed to because of low voltages. As I posted a few days ago, I flew here last weekend and did a long range FPV flight, and when I hooked up the batteries all was fine the lights started their startup sequence and then she was good to fly.

What I also forgot to mention is when the phantom is flashing its red lights indicating a possible problem, when I hook it up to the Naza assistant it displays the low voltage warning box in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, yet when you look at all the voltage settings in Naza they are just perfect and do not indicate any low voltages.

Any ideas would be welcome, I have no idea why she is going this.

 

[PTCX]

Check all the power wires very carefully to see if there is a break or bad connection somewhere.
Look at the battery plug,the wires at the back of the plug could be breaking from the repeditive stress of plugging in and unplugging many times and not making a good connection,I just fixed that on my P1.
Also check the other end of the main power wires where they solder to the main board.There could be a poor solder joint there or again the wire may be fraying or breaking.
Double check all the connections related to the dual battery setup.Make sure everything is connected in correct polarity and there are no short circuits or bad solder joints.
Are you using the auxillary power wires?
If not make sure the end of those wires are not protruding beyond the insulation and touching each other or any other components.
Even if one small strand of wire is creating an intermitent short circuit it could cause mixed signals such as you have described.

Make sure all plugs to all components are plugged in fully and are firm,not loose.
Make sure the circuit boards are clean and free of dust,dirt and debris.It's amazing how much crap can get inside these things.When I opened mine recently for the first time in two years it was filthy.

If all of the above checks out ok then your back to the batteries,although I use the Multistar 4000's myself and they've always been reliable.

Try one battery at a time just to see if it makes a difference.

 

[TheDroid]

Hey thanks for the advice, I will check out all my wires, including the battery ones, I am using the aux wires for the power source for my fpv cam and tx on the drone. I will take off the drone body later when I get home and check all my wire connections, as I mentioned I also have a dji osd module and pmu unit solered into the inside so maybe something is just not connecting right. How did you fix those wires on the battery plugs, seems like maybe that's doing it maybe, the other night she flew without any problems, no issues at all with error lights. Now that's all I get, tried to fly it last night spent about 20 min connecting and disconnecting the batterys to see if she would change no luck.

 

[gianni_BT]

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What I also forgot to mention is when the phantom is flashing its red lights indicating a possible problem, when I hook it up to the Naza assistant it displays the low voltage warning box in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, yet when you look at all the voltage settings in Naza they are just perfect and do not indicate any low voltages.

Any ideas would be welcome, I have no idea why she is going this.

If you are using NAZAM (which version?) , what are the values you read in the ADVANCED/VOLTAGE page? And what in the "View" page, "Voltage" section(bottom right area)?
To understand if there is something wrong in your voltage monitor, you can try to disable the protection switch option in the Advanced/Voltage section of Nazam ,carefully hover at max 1 mt height over a grass surface and measure your flight time: if you can hover for more than 50% of your normal flight time, you probably you have a problem in the voltage monitor circuit. If not, something is really wrong in your connections, as suggested in the PTCX previous post.

 

[TheDroid]

I am using nazam V2, the values I read in the advanced/voltage page are normal for the 2 multistar batteries I use in tandem. I don't have the actual values, but I have set the first and second alarms low like around 9.95 and 9.90, maybe that's too low, was trying to get some more flying time out of the phantom. The DJI osd indicates all is good, battery voltage around 12.7, 12.8, lots of satelites picked up etc. The only thing the osd does is the battery symbol flashes as it should when low voltage is picked up. When I hook up the drone to the Naza assistant I get the small box in the lower right hand portion of the screen and a yellow exclamation mark indicating low voltage, but all settings in the voltage area of the assistant are showing good.

I tried hooking up my batteries one at a time same thing, also the graupner charger I have shows all the voltage settings in each cell to be good, as I mentioned in the above first posting.

I am going to try disabling the voltage alert in naza assistant and try a low level really close flying session to see what happens, I know I can get about 16 to 17 mins on these batteries with everything I have hooked up to them drawing power, but have had a few sessions around 20 to 23 min, so I should be good to fly close to these numbers.


Also I have checked all the connections they seem ok from what I can find. The only thing I have not done yet is to take off the body of the drone and look inside to see if there are any bad connections, I don't expect any, but I cant be sure till I take her apart.

 

[MauTech]

The third cells for both are uneven they should be 4.17 4.17 4.17 for example a .1 or .2 difference is ok but yours isn't

 

[TheDroid]

Ah ok, weird, when I first charged them with the new charger they were good, all cells were as the first 2 showed 4.17 etc, Maybe I will do a storage discharge and then recharge them again and see what hppanes

 

[PTCX]

Taking the battery warning levels down that far,9.90v/9.95v,is not good.
You should not discharge the cells further than 3.8volts each,doing so will reduce your batteries life span considerably.That could be the reason behind one cell being lower in voltage than the rest.
That also may have something to do with the problem your experiencing.

 

[TheDroid]

Ok sounds good I will change the limits, I have not actually flown the phantom yet with those settings so it should be ok on the batteries so far. I am going to shut off the voltage alarm in naza and use my osd and hover test it about 3 meters and see how she responds. I will do a storage discharge on the 2 batteries this weekend. The storage cycle takes each cell of the lips to a safe limit.

 

[gianni_BT]

I am using nazam V2, the values I read in the advanced/voltage page are normal for the 2 multistar batteries I use in tandem. I don't have the actual values, but I have set the first and second alarms low like around 9.95 and 9.90, maybe that's too low, was trying to get some more flying time out of the phantom. The DJI osd indicates all is good, battery voltage around 12.7, 12.8, lots of satelites picked up etc. The only thing the osd does is the battery symbol flashes as it should when low voltage is picked up. When I hook up the drone to the Naza assistant I get the small box in the lower right hand portion of the screen and a yellow exclamation mark indicating low voltage, but all settings in the voltage area of the assistant are showing good.

I tried hooking up my batteries one at a time same thing, also the graupner charger I have shows all the voltage settings in each cell to be good, as I mentioned in the above first posting.

I am going to try disabling the voltage alert in naza assistant and try a low level really close flying session to see what happens, I know I can get about 16 to 17 mins on these batteries with everything I have hooked up to them drawing power, but have had a few sessions around 20 to 23 min, so I should be good to fly close to these numbers.


Also I have checked all the connections they seem ok from what I can find. The only thing I have not done yet is to take off the body of the drone and look inside to see if there are any bad connections, I don't expect any, but I cant be sure till I take her apart.

 

[gianni_BT]

If the voltages 9.95 and 9.9 you mention are the "Loaded" voltage, are low, but they cannot cause the problem of Low voltage detection.
Maybe I would suggest to set the higher at a distance of 0.3 / 0.6 from the lower(from 10.2 to 10.5), in order to have a minimum of recovery time from the first red flashing and the automatic landing for low voltage. But, again, this has nothing to do with the problem we are discussing.
It would be interesting to monitor in the Naza assistant the "Current Voltage" of the battery.
Something that you can try is to perform a "Battery Calibration" even if the voltage is correctly detected( e.g. you can insert a voltage 0.1 greater or lower of the voltage you measure with a meter, even if it corresponds to the voltage shown in the Naza).
It looks to me strange that both the OSD and Naza show the low voltage indication:this means that the internal voltage monitor has something wrong.

 

[TheDroid]

Yeah I readjusted the alarm voltage settings and it seems to be ok now, the battery cells seem ok, one on both batteries is a bit low but I am talking marginal, like after I did a hover test the other day and recharged them, they were like 4.17, 4.17 and 4.13, I personally don't think this is too low for one cell, I could be wrong though. Im my first post see above, when I was getting the low alarm in naza and on the drone, the one cell was a bit lower, but I am not an expert in this area, so I don't know if it was actually low or just a bit off on the voltage. At these volts the drone still flys for around 16 min since I have the OSD PMUV2 and the fpv tx and cam all running off the battery, I am sure it kills some of the flying time I was getting like around 21 to 22 min before I hooked all of these up.

 

[PTCX]

Keep an eye on the temperature of the batteries at the end of flights to make sure they're not getting too hot or puffy.It's ok if they get warm but if they're starting to puff up or getting too hot to hold comfortably take the battery alarm settings up a little more until you find a happy comprimise between flight time and battery temps.
If the batteries get too hot it's not good for them in two ways.1 shortens lifespan and 2 risk of fire.

 

[TheDroid]

OK thankis PTCX, I will keep an eye on it. After the last couple of flights, they were just a tad warm not much at all, I could hold on to them no problem though.

 

[gianni_BT]

Yeah I readjusted the alarm voltage settings and it seems to be ok now, the battery cells seem ok, one on both batteries is a bit low but I am talking marginal, like after I did a hover test the other day and recharged them, they were like 4.17, 4.17 and 4.13, I personally don't think this is too low for one cell, I could be wrong though. Im my first post see above, when I was getting the low alarm in naza and on the drone, the one cell was a bit lower, but I am not an expert in this area, so I don't know if it was actually low or just a bit off on the voltage. At these volts the drone still flys for around 16 min since I have the OSD PMUV2 and the fpv tx and cam all running off the battery, I am sure it kills some of the flying time I was getting like around 21 to 22 min before I hooked all of these up.

4.17 against 4.13 is not too much but is also not normal if you are using a battery charge "Balance" program: the charger should equalize the cell's voltages and stop when all cells are at 4.2V. Then, during flight, if one cell has an higher internal resistance against the other, it will discharge sooner.
If the cell's umbalance increases, it can be a problem: suppose you set your second low level voltage to 9.9: if the 3 cells are balanced, your quad will land with cells at 3.3V each, that is still a safe voltage.
But if they are unbalanced you can get your 9.9 with 2 cells at 3.5 and 1 cell at 2.9, that can cause a permanent failure of your cell, with danger of overheating and even fire.
I am also curious to understand what changes you made in the low voltage settings:did you simply change the 2 thresholds or did you perform a battery calibration as suggested in my last post? This because the simple settings change does not explain why now you do not have the low voltage alarm anymore.

 

[TheDroid]

Yes i did a battery calibration it was quick and simple, not sure if this helped or not. On sat i did a hover test with the voltage alarms off got 16min to landing. When i recharged them all cells were good the one cell in both was a little lower but marginal. I hooked them up to naza assisstant no alarms all is well. This has got me puzzled as i cant put my finger on the problem. It might go good them bamm all of a sudden getting the red light flashing and low voltage alarms in naza assisstant but the actual voltage indications show good. I also changed the low alarms to 10.55 and 10.50 no load too. Also the osd shows a combination voltage of 12.7 to 12.8 fully charged. The battery symbol blinks indicating low voltage but the numbers say 12.7 to 12.8.

Sent from my LG-D950G using PhantomPilots mobile app

 

[gianni_BT]

Yes i did a battery calibration it was quick and simple, not sure if this helped or not. On sat i did a hover test with the voltage alarms off got 16min to landing. When i recharged them all cells were good the one cell in both was a little lower but marginal. I hooked them up to naza assisstant no alarms all is well. This has got me puzzled as i cant put my finger on the problem. It might go good them bamm all of a sudden getting the red light flashing and low voltage alarms in naza assisstant but the actual voltage indications show good. I also changed the low alarms to 10.55 and 10.50 no load too. Also the osd shows a combination voltage of 12.7 to 12.8 fully charged. The battery symbol blinks indicating low voltage but the numbers say 12.7 to 12.8.

Sent from my LG-D950G using PhantomPilots mobile app

OK: if you did the battery calibration, everything makes more sense; either the voltage measuring circuit or the low voltage detection circuit or both were hanged-up and the calibration made a reset.
Thanks for your explanation.
About the settings, personally I would put some more difference between the 2(at least 0.3/0.5V), in order to have some margin to safely go home under my control between the first red led advice to the forced landing, but this depends only on personal way to fly.

 

[TheDroid]

Ok i will try that thanks for your advice i appreciate it very much.

Sent from my LG-D950G using PhantomPilots mobile app