Cold weather…funny story to tell

kheldour · Dec 5, 2016

Hi all,

having my Mavic now since saturday I have completed my third flight with it today.
We have blue skies, the sun is up, but we have about -5º Celsius today.

So I took it to the river Rhine today to launch it from the shallow riverside, Mavic fully loaded, remote fully loaded, iPhone 6s Plus with 74% charge. Good enough for a nice flight.

I fired the rotors up, lifted it to about 35m and did a panoramic video shot of the opposite mountains and castles, let it climb up to 100m and flew all over the other side of the Rhine, still enjoying the new perspective of the castles.

Distance was about 580m, height 100m........and then the iPhone turned black.....no warning, nothing.

So, I checked the remote and everything seems to be okay, just the iPhone went black. I hit the "RTH"-Button and the Mavic immediately responded, turned around and flew all the way back to me and landed as it was supposed to do.

Battery was still over 70%, Remote battery way above 80%.......

As it turned out, the iPhone battery went dead and dropped from 74-0% within 5 minutes !!!!

So, the moral of that little story is… the Mavic can stand cold temperatures quiet well, the iPhone not

I'm actually considering now to get a more stabil platform for controlling the Mavic and consider the Huawei Mate 9 as this comes with an impressive 4000mAh battery and shall last about two days with normal use.

Any other recommendations?

Rgds

Joerg

MacCool · Dec 5, 2016

kheldour said:
Hi all,

having my Mavic now since saturday I have completed my third flight with it today.
We have blue skies, the sun is up, but we have about -5º Celsius today.

So I took it to the river Rhine today to launch it from the shallow riverside, Mavic fully loaded, remote fully loaded, iPhone 6s Plus with 74% charge. Good enough for a nice flight.

I fired the rotors up, lifted it to about 35m and did a panoramic video shot of the opposite mountains and castles, let it climb up to 100m and flew all over the other side of the Rhine, still enjoying the new perspective of the castles.

Distance was about 580m, height 100m........and then the iPhone turned black.....no warning, nothing.
So, I checked the remote and everything seems to be okay, just the iPhone went black. I hit the "RTH"-Button and the Mavic immediately responded, turned around and flew all the way back to me and landed as it was supposed to do.

Battery was still over 70%, Remote battery way above 80%.......

As it turned out, the iPhone battery went dead and dropped from 74-0% within 5 minutes !!!!
So, the moral of that little story is… the Mavic can stand cold temperatures quiet well, the iPhone not

I'm actually considering now to get a more stabil platform for controlling the Mavic and consider the Huawei Mate 9 as this comes with an impressive 4000mAh battery and shall last about two days with normal use.

Any other recommendations?

Rgds

Joerg

I've had that happen on my Phantom 4, flying Litchi. In that case, the iPhone went completely dead...shut down completely. The Phantom went ahead and finished the mission and landed as planned. When I went to restart the iPhone, I got the "dead battery" icon. I waited about a minute, hit the home button again and the phone re-booted normally and when it did, it came up with 30% battery, which is about where I had started. My theory is that if you start flying with a relatively low battery charge on the iPhone, it will draw so much current that the phone thinks the battery is dead when it's actually not. I started making sure that the phone was fully charged before flying and had no problem, started using an iPad Mini 4 without regard to battery charge, and had no problem there either.

Pedro · Dec 5, 2016

What viewing device will you be using?

Kilrah · Dec 5, 2016

There are dozens of posts about iPhones turning off even when not cold when running the resource-intensive GO app. On some of the 6S series it's due to a battery issue Apple have a recall for, on the 6 series it's usually the battery simply getting old and not being able to take the hit anymore.
Interestingly no other device than iPhones have been reported to have that problem.

kheldour · Dec 5, 2016

Kilrah said:
Interestingly no other device than iPhones have been reported to have that problem.

I guess that I keep the iPhone then for business calls and get myself a good 2nd phone for general purpose.
As said, I favour the Huawei Mate 9 at the moment.

Kilrah · Dec 5, 2016

I have a Mate 8 for use with the Mavic, works awesome and nice big screen

TRP · Dec 5, 2016

Seems a if most Iphones have this issue. No issues on my android Oneplus 2. I never personally liked apple and this is a good reason not to buy one, No offense to iphone owners.

dam · Dec 5, 2016

Why not simply purchase a mophie case and extent the battery like so.. and save from buying another phone.
Shop hold force powerstation plus mini for mophie base cases - Free Shipping | mophie

kheldour · Dec 5, 2016

Because the iPhone doesn't really fit into the remote. Except I use the third party tablet adapter....which I don't like

Sent from my iPhone using MavicPilots

dam · Dec 5, 2016

kheldour said:
Because the iPhone doesn't really fit into the remote. Except I use the third party tablet adapter....which I don't like

Sent from my iPhone using MavicPilots

That's strange..heard the iphone7+ works just fine !

generaltso · Dec 5, 2016

No battery issues here with an iPhone 7 Plus.

kheldour · Dec 5, 2016

generaltso said:
No battery issues here with an iPhone 7 Plus.

sounds promising

EasyV · Dec 5, 2016

I was flying yesterday with the iPad mini @ 0C/32F and the display started to fade after a few minutes. Never went completely black. I cut my flight short....landed. About a 6 minute flight, didn't notice any excessive battery drain on the iPad.