Experiment: Battery Drain in Flight

[RayOZ]

I wanted to perform an experiment to see the rate of battery drain during flight. Obviously, I need a consistent flight profile. No user input required when experiment is started.
So, I decided to use Point of Interest mode, and let my Mavic fly in circles. Then use the flight logs to plot some trends. The flight path are 8+ perfect circles (1km circumference). Set speed was 36kph, but it was quite windy, so flight speed varied a bit (a still day would've been ideal). Basically, battery % and voltage drop is pretty much linear, between 100% and 30%. I didn't want to try 100% to 0%, cos I didn't want to reduce the battery life/health. Maybe there's a sharp drop between 10% and 0% if someone is keen to test.
I couldn't attach an excel here, so here are some pics.

Battery in %, 0 decimal, so I interpolated the % between integers.
I guess the setup can be used to test efficiency for speed (10kph, 20kph, 30kph, etc), prop comparison (standard, low noise, carbon fiber, etc)

 

[Former Member]

Thank you for the experiment. Was this an MP? How old and how many cycles does the battery have?

Your experiment shows that the battery drains from 100% to 30% at a rate of 3.5% per minute average, and it's great that it's so linear, due to the internal circuitry. In essence, you should be able to get 20 minutes out of a fully charged battery and land at 30% reserve.

 

[RayOZ]

This is MP (White). The battery is new (came with replaced MP last month). Only 7 times charged. Manufacture date is 25 Oct 2017, though.
Perhaps it might be a good experiment to repeat with the same battery after 50 charge cycles.

 

[Tbredhed]

This is MP (White). The battery is new (came with replaced MP last month). Only 7 times charged. Manufacture date is 25 Oct 2017, though.
Perhaps it might be a good experiment to repeat with the same battery after 50 charge cycles.

This is great data thanks for taking the time to post!

 

[Akoztha]

Cool experiment!

 

[RayOZ]

Finally, weather has eased up and I managed to get a bit of time to do a bit more test.

So, it seems that for max flight time, stick with P-mode with OA on. For max distance, it seems to be a toss between OA on/off.
Sport mode is only if you want to go fast, but very short flight times. Might as well get a racing drone if you want to go fast.

The strangest thing is that, for every test, across multiple batteries and test scenarios, I get this same dip in battery % around the 82% mark, and some at 74% mark. Very curious why the on-board calculation does that.

 

[MiniPalourde]

Finally, weather has eased up and I managed to get a bit of time to do a bit more test.
View attachment 35690
So, it seems that for max flight time, stick with P-mode with OA on. For max distance, it seems to be a toss between OA on/off.
Sport mode is only if you want to go fast, but very short flight times. Might as well get a racing drone if you want to go fast.

The strangest thing is that, for every test, across multiple batteries and test scenarios, I get this same dip in battery % around the 82% mark, and some at 74% mark. Very curious why the on-board calculation does that.
View attachment 35691View attachment 35692View attachment 35693View attachment 35694View attachment 35695View attachment 35696View attachment 35697

Thank you for these quality charts

 

[Hedonist222]

How did you extract this data from the multirotor ?