How to test battery?

[Bunger]

I have 1 "stock" Phantom 2200mAh battery and 2 3rd party 2700mAh batteries. Actually, they are these batteries:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5853

I also just bought and received this battery balancer/discharger/volt meter:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008PA ... UTF8&psc=1

Unfortunately, I am not entirely certain what I am looking for when using the tester. What are some good "general" guidelines for those who use these testers to validate their batteries?

Thanks in advance!

 

[OI Photography]

I have that tester too and it works great.

A charged battery should read close to 4.20V on all cells.

It's ok for the individual cell readings to not exactly match up with each other, but if any one of the three get more than .1V off from the rest it MAY indicate a bad cell (or it may not, just keep an eye on it). If that happens, just click "balance" on the unit and it will discharge the batt just a tiny bit to rebalance the cells.

3-5 minutes after a full flight that ended from the voltage warnings, the battery should read ~3.75V/cell. Much lower than that (i.e. lower than 3.7V) may mean you're pushing it a bit to far...values of 3.8V or above may mean you can squeeze a little more flight time. Each individual battery will have it's own limits you can push it to, those will be obvious after a few flight tests and watching the values before and after the flight.

Use the tester to compare the actual batt levels with what the NAZA reads in the Voltage tab. Usually it will be correct, but it can get out of whack a bit. You can just adjust the value in the NAZA to match what the voltages read on your new tester.

Keep your two 2700mAh batts numbered or labeled so you can distinguish them easily for testing/tracking purposes, and so you can rotate them (fly with each the same amount, roughly)

 

[Bunger]

Great information!! Thanks a ton!!

 

[OI Photography]

No problem! After enough flights measuring your batteries like that, you'll be able to pretty accurately gauge how much time each batt will give you in different situations, without just relying on the NAZA's warnings.

 

[tanasit]

http://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-EOS-Sent ... 53-7947456

I use the tester above (you can buy a lot cheaper somewhere else, like HK or ?bay).

Since one flies his Phantom with different factors that affect the flight time because the different consumption of the battery power. Yes, the voltage setting in NAZA can be set to suit individual without any other devices but requires some testing.
The factors I mentioned above include: total flying weight, prop size, temperature, altitude of the location (different barometric pressure), humidity, flying style, motors condition, wind condition, battery C-rate, etc.

I set the goal of NOT to use more than 80% of the pack capacity, so the gadget above comes in handy.
As soon as I landed (either by first level fail safe warning or second self landing, up to you but I prefer just after the first level then land), I check the capacity left on the pack. If it is much higher than 20%, say 28% then I know that I still have more flight time left, so I can adjust the FS setting to even lower voltage number. On the other hand if the gadget reads 20% or less, I then know that I have to set the FS voltage number HIGHER or else my pack will not have a long service life.
I also tested flight for the time that is the duration between the first warning and the self landing, so that I have the idea of how much time do I have after the first warning because I sometime fly over water and want to have enough time to bring her back!

At the moment after each flight, all of my battery still have a little over 20% left.

Note also that, higher capacity pack will give you more time between the first warning and second (assuming the same pay load as the less capacity pack). This is also holds true for higher C-rated pack.