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flyNfrank said:Jayson Hanes said:Frank, as Amit said, when the motors stop due to low battery, there is still plenty of juice to power the FLT and maintain location to the flytrex servers as long as a data connection can be maintained. I would put money on the idea that, up until impact on the ground, that the FLT would still be transmitting to the best of its ability, and be far more accurate than the "find my phantom" -- because the phantom would already be off and no longer updating it's location via wifi.
However, the phantom will not sit up at altitude until the motors shut off.. so I think this is a needless hypothetical because it'd be on it's way down long before the motors shut off due to low voltage..
Regardless of that, if it were to drop out of the sky at altitude due to motor shut off, during impact many batteries are ejected and there would likely be no more updates.. in those cases I don't see why we couldn't use a lightweight 12v lipo (or close) in parallel with the power source (and a diode between the batteries's positive's, to prevent the phantom from drawing current from it, while allowing the smaller lipo to source current FROM the main battery).. I haven't seen the current requirements of the FLT anywhere yet.. but this should be easily feasible even if only as an upgrade.
In fact, I've seen a few people decide against soldering to their phantom and using an external lipo.. so a combination makes sense to me, even if I don't see it as necessary.
For anyone to bring up how much power is still left in the battery after the motors shut off in this case, is only wasting time & energy. When the Vision's battery shuts off, it's off. When it's off, it will not supply power to anything.
Jayson, you told us how if our quads lost power, they would drop to the ground like a rock and their last transmitted signal would be a zillion times more accurate then without a signal. I gave you a flight scenario and asked you to explain or even take a guess on the location of it's where abouts, and apparently you couldn't come up with anything. I mentioned it was not the actual events
The FLT is what it says it is. A Live Tracker...it only tracks when it Live. But with a small mod, it could be a kickass device.
Hi flyNfrank
*As far as I know*, I don't believe that the Phantom has any cut-off circuit that cuts the power completely at a certain point. As I mentioned in my previous post, the Live should have enough power to continue operating for hours (if not days..) long after the engines turn off. This is just the way batteries behave and the fact that the Live consumes much (much) less current from the LiPo compared to 4 (or more) engines..
With that said, if you prefer, you can easily hook the Live to a stand alone battery, so it won't rely on the Phantom's LiPo. This should work nicely and this way the Live won't rely on the Phantom main LiPo.