Larger more capacity battery

rydfree · May 15, 2017

Will Dji ever come out with a larger battery (Think Humpback) with more mah capacity or has people flying outside of visual range already with the stock battery pretty much scared them away from the possibility ? Do you think any aftermarket vendors will tackle the idea ?
I want a plug and play smart battery replacement with at least 4000mah . 5000 would be awesome . I do a lot of outdoor stuff , pond building , land clearing , tree removal , construction etc that I would like to put the Mavic up and have it POI for more than 15-20 minutes .

blackoutgt · May 16, 2017

I think the issue becomes the additional weight of a larger battery. In theory the larger battery supplies a longer flight time, but the additional weight would cause a decrease in flight time. Therefore you end up back at the same spot you were originally. As I understand it there is a sweet spot for the weight to mah ratio. If you are truly interested in a platform for extended flights, I've heard of tethered drones that will stay aloft indefinitely with power being supplied from the ground. Keep in mind though that your range is only 500 ish feet.

Kilrah · May 16, 2017

There is a point determined by aircraft design where increasing battery capacity doesn't give extra runtime because it won't sufficiently offset the power needed to lift the extra weight anymore. Whether a large battery would be a possibility depends on that point, but given the Mavic focuses on portability and no payload I doubt the margin is huge.

rydfree · May 16, 2017

Yeah I'm aware of diminishing returns , I've been building and flying drones for many years now and playing around with different battery capacities . There are people now that are adding extra batteries to the mavic with good success so there are gains to be made . Just wondering if any aftermarket s will get in the game .

mavic6611 · May 16, 2017

dji have already put duel batteries on the inspire and Matrice. Who knows maybe Mavic 2 will see this?!

Kilrah · May 16, 2017

In the case of the Inspire they've put dual batteries of half the size each, so it's not exactly bringing you any further. They haven't done it for flight time, but redundancy and shipping / travelling constraints.

Matrice is flexible between number of batteries and payload which is nice, but that's done mostly because of varying payload which a Mavic doesn't have.