Charging batteries, cycles?

[pinzmann]

So I checked the battery cycle on my Air 2 the other day and was taken aback on how many cycles I had on it. Got me to thinking what counts as a cycle. Let’s say I charge up the battery and don’t get to fly as planned. So a some time later I want to fly and I top off the battery. Does that count as 2 cycles? Also if I use a 100% battery and run it down to 1% and another 100% battery run down to 60%. Recharge both, each adding 1 cycle even though the 100 to 1% is affected more than the other. Up to this point, I haven’t been checking my battery count. Seems to me that battery count could be misleading.

 

[Gagey52]

This is the response from another thread with a similar question. MAvic_South_Oz said
"The intelligent batteries will register % charge as just that of a cycle.
Eg. Use a battery down to 50%, charge fully, 0.5 cycles.
Do that again next day it will be a cycle on the battery.
If it's odd like 2.4 charges done, it will show 2 cycles until it tops off another 60% charge(s).
I think the mini batteries are different being non lipo and non intelligent ?"

I hope this helps.
Regards

 

[Yaros]

From what I heard, in older DJI Batteries (Phantom 3 and earlier) a cycle counts by discharging the battery lower than 60% and then charging it back. On newer batteries however, that's not the case. If you have charged to 100%, then the battery discharges to 99% and you charge it back to 100%, that will not count as a cycle, you will need to put into the battery 99% more of charge, in order for it to count as a cycle, which you can, by flying the battery and then charging it back.
Note: You can't charge a DJI battery that has more than 95% of charge in it, you would need to discharge it to 95% before charging it back to 100%, but that would still not count as a cycle.

So what I think the battery is looking at, is the milliamp hours (mAh) put into the battery, then every time that number of mAh reaches the capacity of the battery (3500 mAh approx. for the Air 2), it increments the cycle counter and then resets the mAh counter to 0 and starts over when charging the next time. At least that what makes most sense to me, I might be wrong. DJI themselves don't confirm how this system works, we can only guess.​

 

[Alex Baxter]

This is the response from another thread with a similar question. MAvic_South_Oz said
"The intelligent batteries will register % charge as just that of a cycle.
Eg. Use a battery down to 50%, charge fully, 0.5 cycles.
Do that again next day it will be a cycle on the battery.
If it's odd like 2.4 charges done, it will show 2 cycles until it tops off another 60% charge(s).
I think the mini batteries are different being non lipo and non intelligent ?"

I hope this helps.
Regards

That's my understanding too. I've got 165 charges on one (of three) of my Mavic pro (2016) batteries, and a total of c. 250 charges, that amounts to about 4 days in the air..

 

[Gagey52]

That's my understanding too. I've got 165 charges on one (of three) of my Mavic pro (2016) batteries, and a total of c. 250 charges, that amounts to about 4 days in the air..

Mate, can’t complain about those figures.

 

[Alex Baxter]

Mate, can’t complain about those figures.

Absolutely, the durability of the drone and ancillaries is excellent.