Battery lights partially failed

[svit-tank-drone]

Hello all. I had a crash the other day due to an unintentional low speed, low altitude meet up between my drone and a cable. I retrieved the drone and there was no damage visible. I did a full pre-flight again and put it back in the air for a short hover and very limited flight to see if there were any issues not visible in pre-flight. Everything worked fine. When I was recharging the battery later, I noticed only 2 of the 4 arcs of the circle light up when charging or pressing the button to check charge level. However, if I put that battery in the drone and power on/connect, the DJI app shows it at 100% charge. While on with app showing 100%, a press to test shows only the 2 lights.

So, should I be worried about the viability of the battery from the crash with two lights out, or should I go with app reading that all is well? The drone flies fine on the battery, but I am curious if anyone here has any similar experience and can share if I am on borrowed time with the battery so I don’t find out mid-flight in the near future!

Thanks!

 

[Former Member]

If any of the lights are not working, then the internal circuitry might be damaged. I would keep it as a backup battery.

 

[brett8883]

Hello all. I had a crash the other day due to an unintentional low speed, low altitude meet up between my drone and a cable. I retrieved the drone and there was no damage visible. I did a full pre-flight again and put it back in the air for a short hover and very limited flight to see if there were any issues not visible in pre-flight. Everything worked fine. When I was recharging the battery later, I noticed only 2 of the 4 arcs of the circle light up when charging or pressing the button to check charge level. However, if I put that battery in the drone and power on/connect, the DJI app shows it at 100% charge. While on with app showing 100%, a press to test shows only the 2 lights.

So, should I be worried about the viability of the battery from the crash with two lights out, or should I go with app reading that all is well? The drone flies fine on the battery, but I am curious if anyone here has any similar experience and can share if I am on borrowed time with the battery so I don’t find out mid-flight in the near future!

Thanks!

My personal take is if there is any physical damage to a battery in any way, that battery really shouldn’t be used. It could turn out that’s really the only thing wrong and the battery is A ok.

But on the other hand, if the battery took a hard enough hit that the lights got knocked out what else could be affected? Those DJI batteries have a computer chip in them that regulates charging and also is what tells the aircraft how much power is left.

I still have fresh in my mind the relatively recent ordeal with the DJI Matrice high capacity batteries. There was a problem with the computer chip in them and they were literally causeing $30,000 5kg drones to fall out of the sky

 

[svit-tank-drone]

Thanks for the replies here. Agree on all counts. Replacement battery gets here tomorrow and I’ll use this one for power when I plug in to my computer or to do any transfers or ops checks on the ground.