Phantom 3 Testing

Initial Testing and Battery Issues

So far, we have flown 15 times for a total of about 2 hours of flight time.  All of these flights have been tests.  Attempting to understand the camera as well as the flight characteristics of the quad.  We have flown it in 4 areas.  The local college, the edge of the city, a farm and a flying field.

After the initial testing using the 2 batteries that came with the Phantom, I made a point of signing up on Healthy Drones and uploading the flight logs to that location for parsing.  Before I dive into what I found in the logs, let's look at how to get to the logs on an iOS device.

We use an Apple iPad Air II as the mobile device for the Phantom.  Apple does not make it as simple as a file copy that Android does.  To get the logs, you must run up iTunes on your computer.  Here is a Youtube video that illustrates the process under Windows.

For the Mac, the process is the same except that the log files are in a sub-folder called FlightRecords.  You will still use the "Save To" button to get at them.  Once you have the files on your computer you can upload them to Healthy Drones for analysis, which is what we do.  Every flight.

Another thing we do is that we run the batteries to 50% for the first 10 cycles.  It has been said that this will extend the life of the battery.  I have yet to finish a single battery for 10 flights.  The battery that came with the Phantom has 6 charges on it now.

After the maiden flight, I uploaded the logs and noticed that the extra battery that came with the Phantom had 3 major voltage deviations.  What is that, you say?  Here is the description from Healthy Drones:

Major Deviations ©
Major deviation is when a cell differs more than 0.07v from the other cells.
Please note that normal batteries can have a few of these. 
An abnormal battery will:
    A) Have most of the major deviations in one cell
    B) There will be multiple major deviations per minute, and more than 10 total
    C) The deviations continue longer than 1 minute
If your battery shows all symptoms (example, another) then this is considered a more severe case of an inefficient battery and may impact the battery life.
If your battery has only 1-4 instances on the same cell, don't worry too much about it. If it has 5-10 instances - then continue to track and make sure it does not degrade:

So, when I checked this out, the main battery was fine.  No deviations.  The second battery had 3 deviations:

Had that been the limit of the issue, there would be no concern.  At the end of the day, what this impacts is the longevity of the battery.  Well, these batteries ain't cheap, so I want maximum longevity!

So, after doing a couple more flights and checking the logs, the major deviation never abated but instead increased massively.  So we called up B&H where we bought it and asked for an RMA.  Sadly, we were outside of the return window so B&H advised us to buy another new battery and return it with the old battery in the box.

Instead we opted to buy 3 batteries.  One to replace the bad one and 2 more to extend flight time.  I have flown the new batteries a few times and one of them has exhibited a couple of major deviations but I do not think they will be an issue.

I will be flying this afternoon using the 3 new batteries as well as tomorrow afternoon so I should get a good data sampling from those flights and we can confirm that the batteries are good.  Or not :)

I will blog about those results soon.  Until then, fly safe, fly legal but FLY!