When do you charge your battery? How many cycles do you have?

[ihavesheetsforbrains]

At what % do you stop using it and charge the battery?

How many cycles recharging have you battery lasted?

Right now I will definitely stop everything once it gets to 30%. Otherwise I sometimes charge it at 50%.

I have about 8 recharge cycles.

 

[bunkphenomenon]

I have my low battery warning set to 35%. Ill bring it in once it starts to give me the low battery warning.
Unless I know I will be going out again within a day or two, ill keep the batteries at that state (uncharged).
A fully charged battery not being used is supposed to automatically discharge to ~60% after 10 days but Im not exactly sure what the best practice is though.

 

[DaveB68]

My batteries are quite new <10 charges so I fly to about 40% and then leave them until next time I fly charging them beforehand.

 

[alokbhargava]

General rules:

1. Charge them fully before flying
2. Start landing procedure when you are at 30%
3. Land by the time you are 20%
4. Perform deep charge discharge charge after 20 cycles
5. Warm batteries if you are flying in cold weathers
6. Use reliable battery chargers to charge your batteries
7. Never discharge to zero percentage

 

[ihavesheetsforbrains]

When you guys stop at 30-40% charge, how many minutes are you getting from your flight?

My battery shows around 22min flight time at 100% charge. So I only get around 10min flight time when I stop at 50%.

I think if I want to reliably keep a comfortable 30% margin, I will only get around 15min usable flight time. Something to consider when using litchi waypoints.

 

[Erroll]

General rules:

1. Charge them fully before flying
2. Start landing procedure when you are at 30%
3. Land by the time you are 20%
4. Perform deep charge discharge charge after 20 cycles
5. Warm batteries if you are flying in cold weathers
6. Use reliable battery chargers to charge your batteries
7. Never discharge to zero percentage

I agree completely with the above 'general' rules for 'general' flying but they should not be hard and fast rules. If you are flying a job you must know what your quad can do and not panic when the battery gets to some arbitrary limit. For example, yesterday I filmed a SUP paddling fun race and if I had come in to change batteries at 30% I would have missed the eventual winner taking the lead. I stuck with it, filmed the rest of the field coming home, and landed at 16%.

These batteries are really not that flimsy. I fly a lot and my batteries are all at around 60 cycles, and they all still show above 90% battery life.

 

[Ken Hanks]

Copied from DJI Intelligent Flight battery manual

 

[soks]

Hey,

My battery have only 3 charge cycles. And it's showing lower capacity that designed 4290 vs 4480...
Is it normal, or my battery is dying? I have aloso noticed that 1st cell have slightly lover voltage 002-003v.

 

[Ajginger]

At what % do you stop using it and charge the battery?

How many cycles recharging have you battery lasted?

Right now I will definitely stop everything once it gets to 30%. Otherwise I sometimes charge it at 50%.

I have about 8 recharge cycles.

I use every drop out of my batts almost every flight.

Regularly hold lift stick up to get last few meters before landing at %6

 

[With The Birds]

I use every drop out of my batts almost every flight.

Regularly hold lift stick up to get last few meters before landing at %6

Would be interested in your charge cycle/life statistics.....

 

[alokbhargava]

I use every drop out of my batts almost every flight.

Regularly hold lift stick up to get last few meters before landing at %6

You are very bold.

 

[alokbhargava]

I agree completely with the above 'general' rules for 'general' flying but they should not be hard and fast rules. If you are flying a job you must know what your quad can do and not panic when the battery gets to some arbitrary limit. For example, yesterday I filmed a SUP paddling fun race and if I had come in to change batteries at 30% I would have missed the eventual winner taking the lead. I stuck with it, filmed the rest of the field coming home, and landed at 16%.

These batteries are really not that flimsy. I fly a lot and my batteries are all at around 60 cycles, and they all still show above 90% battery life.

Absolutely right

 

[ihavesheetsforbrains]

Actually that has me wondering.

Since this is a for dummies 'managed' battery blackbox with an onboard chip.

Did DJI design it so that it allows you to drain the battery to the point of damaging it when it gets close to zero, or does the battery life displayed account for a healthy margin room to protect the life of the battery even if you try to drain it to 0%, or in case of a RTH allow a few more drops of juice to get home?

Basically is it idiot proof with a margin of safety built in? If this is the case, it means you can comfortably fly every last drop of the battery with a margin of safety built in.

Or are the voltages at near 0% basically 0V? In that case, I should continue stopping at around 30%.

 

[Ajginger]

From what I understand, dji has the dummy safety margin built in. I think this because when I fly my dual batt mod the two extra batts (1.6's) still have plenty in them when the app says 6%.

 

[bernek]

General rules:

1. Charge them fully before flying
2. Start landing procedure when you are at 30%
3. Land by the time you are 20%
4. Perform deep charge discharge charge after 20 cycles
5. Warm batteries if you are flying in cold weathers
6. Use reliable battery chargers to charge your batteries
7. Never discharge to zero percentage

Thanks for the information !

Regarding point 4. DJI says that you should discharge to 8% then fully charge is that in DJI VISION app ? should I get my batteries down to 8% then fully charge ?
They have 10-20 cycles and 98-99% life left (from DJI Mac app that tell me that information).

Also can I leave 1 battery turned off but inside the Phantom 2 VISION ?

After how long should I discharge batteries to 50% I leave them fully charged for 3-4 days not sure if I should discharge since I might want to fly !

There are different firmware (at least for my 2 batteries) one is 2.x.x.x and the other is 1.0.6.x.x or 1.6.x.x.x

Thanks in advance.

 

[alokbhargava]

DJI recommended to discharge to 8%, other experiments say it should be discharged to 2%, its difficult to judge if we have really discharged to 2% of charge capacity, I will suggest to keep a value between 4-6% when you are seeing these values on DJI Go app. We don't want to damage the batteries and as the charge remaining on the batteries is a calculated value, there could be an error in FW. Best way is to charge to 100% first and then discharge to say 4% and charge back to 100%.

You should follow this deep discharge after about 20 cycles of charge discharge.

One can leave one battery inside phantom but why do you want to do as a regular practice. We all know charge tries to corrode terminals so better to avoid storing batteries in the phantom it self for long time.

If you are not using the batteries, better discharge them to say 60%. Keeping fully charge to 3-4 days is not a problem

P3P/A has revised battery FW as a part of 1.6

 

[MikeyOnline]

I flew mine yesterday just to get some test shots after writing some lens distortion correction software and doing some color profiling of the camera (for DNG support), and it surprised me that when I returned after an 11 minute flight, DJI Go was showing 69% battery remaining. At first I was impressed but it did make me worry that... I wonder if that could be an inaccurate reading and get me in trouble?

Mike

 

[LeMonds]

I flew mine yesterday just to get some test shots after writing some lens distortion correction software and doing some color profiling of the camera (for DNG support), and it surprised me that when I returned after an 11 minute flight, DJI Go was showing 69% battery remaining. At first I was impressed but it did make me worry that... I wonder if that could be an inaccurate reading and get me in trouble?

Mike

i have gotten similar times when hovering with the occasional reposition (messing with the camera)

 

[bernek]

DJI recommended to discharge to 8%, other experiments say it should be discharged to 2%, its difficult to judge if we have really discharged to 2% of charge capacity, I will suggest to keep a value between 4-6% when you are seeing these values on DJI Go app. We don't want to damage the batteries and as the charge remaining on the batteries is a calculated value, there could be an error in FW. Best way is to charge to 100% first and then discharge to say 4% and charge back to 100%.

You should follow this deep discharge after about 20 cycles of charge discharge.

One can leave one battery inside phantom but why do you want to do as a regular practice. We all know charge tries to corrode terminals so better to avoid storing batteries in the phantom it self for long time.

If you are not using the batteries, better discharge them to say 60%. Keeping fully charge to 3-4 days is not a problem

P3P/A has revised battery FW as a part of 1.6

I'm using P2V (non plus) and not sure if my batteries have the feature to discharge automatically. They are fully charged now since Friday. I will take one down to 4-6% since it has 20 (total) cycles in DJI APP and the other one has only 6 so I will discharge it to 60%. I can use a multimeter to measure the exact voltage on the terminals what reading should I get ? The procent thing is relative but I can discharge to a more exact value measuring the voltage (that would be combined voltage anyway...). I guess the cycle discharge is for balancing the voltage between cells ... how much of a difference is acceptable ? in mV.

I've never payed so much attention to LiPo batteries since they were cheap. Now with DJI batteries (at least for me) they are very expensive so I need to take proper care.

Regarding leaving a battery inside I will stop doing it.

Thanks.