Management 102, Be The Battery

For P2 and other personal drone pilots, keeping track of inflight battery usage is an essential task in making sure that you have that mini SD card in your hand following a video session. There are a few ways to monitor batteries but the most important is to have a timer set to the maximum flying time that your experience dictates that you have on one battery. Seems that I am always a quart low on electrons. I Velcro the timer onto my transmitter radio.

The amount of flight time that you have on a battery will vary depending upon how hard your quad needs to work on a specific flight. I have found the attaching the FPV Tx, Zenmuse gimbal and GoPro has cut my flight time from 20 minutes to around 14. However, if I have some wind and active flying in the mission, that time is further reduced. For me, I set the timer at 11 minutes. I bring Tommy back at that time which can take a couple of minutes to return to home.  Of course, the Fatshark googles also show remaining battery life in the display. (I have 5 batteries. ready to go.)

Make sure that your checklist has a line item regarding the timer and make sure that you start the timer upon launch. That’s right Grasshopper, more discipline with the checklist.

More about batteries; specifically LiPo batteries. I have been involved with RC flying stuff for almost two years. I belong to a flying club with our own field and maybe 100 members. We fly only electric and therefore have lots of stories about LiPo batteries. Each one of us has had one of those ‘great friggin opportunity to learn’ times with LiPos. Net-net: If they catch on fire, you will want that flaming turd to be outside as it is incredibly smelly if not toxic. Have a good recharger and recharge where a possible fire will simply be annoying and not involve your insurance provider. Most everyone in the club has had a fire for one of many reasons. Mine was a bad Electronic Speed Control that shorted out the battery upon connection and I just barely got it out into the driveway where it burned for 10 minutes. 

Keep these batteries in a closed metal container. We use surplus steel ammo boxes.

For DJI Phantom 2’s and latter, the battery monitoring and recharge system is quite sophisticated and so far, safe. As a result, the batteries are very expensive. For other manufactures, you will most likely be using a standard off the shelf battery and recharge system. Be careful.