(I’m long winded; skip these first 2 paragraphs to get to the real point/question). I don’t fly my 2.5 year old Mavic Air much now that I’ve got the M2P, but I keep it because it’s a fun and dependable little drone to have, and is a bit easier to deploy than the M2P if I want to do a quick flight. Since they no longer manufacture batteries, I try to use best practices to keep them healthy, and every 3 months or so, I cycle all 4 batteries and recharge to 60% (or as close as I can get it - I watch the charger and wait for the third light to start blinking to pull it off.
So far, the batteries seem to be fine, except for the issue below. 3 have 150 or so cycles, the 4th (bought later) has about 50, and all are 3 years old since manufacture. I’m getting 15 minutes easily with 25% left, which is about what each was like new.
Today, on my final flight with the newest battery, I did notice something strange in the AirData battery info. I decided to fly a Litchi mission, which lasted about 5 minutes. At the end of the mission, I set it to RTH. Mission executed perfectly, and it started RTH. I wanted to fly some more so I cancelled after it got close and did some free flight and a couple of orbits of friends’ houses to send to them. Landed just fine, and that was that. Perfect flights on all 4 batteries.
Looking at AirData, though, I saw a major voltage deviation in cell 3 (.109v) on the Litchi flight (for 10 seconds, though I think that’s a factor of the lack of granularity of Litchi’s data vs. DJI Go; the deviation may have been much shorter but Litchi records in much larger chunks). I’m not too concerned about deviations, even major ones, since I can count on 2 hands the total number I have EVER seen in total, and I review the data of every flight. And .109 once doesn’t concern me too much; at all times, each cell was well in the safe range.
The strange thing about this one was that it popped up at the EXACT instant the mode switched to RTH, per the AirData notification log report. Has anyone ever experienced this sort of battery behavior, either with Litchi or Go in RTH? I rarely use RTH but I will test it out and look at voltages next time I fly the Air. Is there something about RTH that causes a bigger draw or would otherwise explain this? It just seemed strange to me that a simple action like that would cause a deviation flag. I did a bit of flying in sport mode, too (something else I don’t use much) and while the voltages dropped as expected, they did so consistently across cells with no deviation.
Thanks for any insight.
So far, the batteries seem to be fine, except for the issue below. 3 have 150 or so cycles, the 4th (bought later) has about 50, and all are 3 years old since manufacture. I’m getting 15 minutes easily with 25% left, which is about what each was like new.
Today, on my final flight with the newest battery, I did notice something strange in the AirData battery info. I decided to fly a Litchi mission, which lasted about 5 minutes. At the end of the mission, I set it to RTH. Mission executed perfectly, and it started RTH. I wanted to fly some more so I cancelled after it got close and did some free flight and a couple of orbits of friends’ houses to send to them. Landed just fine, and that was that. Perfect flights on all 4 batteries.
Looking at AirData, though, I saw a major voltage deviation in cell 3 (.109v) on the Litchi flight (for 10 seconds, though I think that’s a factor of the lack of granularity of Litchi’s data vs. DJI Go; the deviation may have been much shorter but Litchi records in much larger chunks). I’m not too concerned about deviations, even major ones, since I can count on 2 hands the total number I have EVER seen in total, and I review the data of every flight. And .109 once doesn’t concern me too much; at all times, each cell was well in the safe range.
The strange thing about this one was that it popped up at the EXACT instant the mode switched to RTH, per the AirData notification log report. Has anyone ever experienced this sort of battery behavior, either with Litchi or Go in RTH? I rarely use RTH but I will test it out and look at voltages next time I fly the Air. Is there something about RTH that causes a bigger draw or would otherwise explain this? It just seemed strange to me that a simple action like that would cause a deviation flag. I did a bit of flying in sport mode, too (something else I don’t use much) and while the voltages dropped as expected, they did so consistently across cells with no deviation.
Thanks for any insight.
