For all you lidar lovers who fly the DJI M300, I have a question…
Scenario: You are on a multi-battery mission. The M300 returns home at the appointed time, lands and you spring into action! You grab your fresh set of batteries (each pair is considered ONE unit, they are not mismatched), go to the M300, carefully remove one old battery and install the new battery, repeat… But now your drone won’t take off!! Why? Well, you “fresh” batteries happen to have a voltage mismatch (damn self discharge feature). My left battery was at 91%, the right battery was at 89%… the voltage difference was too much for software, therefore, I can not fly. (remember, your time is limited when the R2A is running on the ground, at the first sign of distress, perform R2A shut down so you don’t corrupt the data you have)
Booooooooo.
So what are the options? This is where I am looking for community feedback…
- We could turn on the self-heat but the batteries are already warm and we are nowhere close to freezing. A hot battery working hard is a bad idea.
- We could place the batts in the charger (but I’m in the field and I did not bring my charger, nor do I currently have the facilities for mobile recharging)…
- Could I bleed off the full battery with a dead battery on the other side? Would it eventually bring down the full one, closer to the it’s twin? I know it won’t fly, but how else does one match batteries in the field?
What would you do?
As it turns out, I had to return to base, recharge/grab new batteries, return to field and refly. The concern is that one day we will be in the middle of nowhere with this problem.
Cheers!