Three flights, three different battery packs, multiple errors

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Apr 30, 2015
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Cardiff, Wales. UK
Tonight I had a lot of battery communication errors. It was getting pretty annoying.

I didn't notice any drop off in performance & my phantom stayed aloft, so that's good - but the communication errors just kept coming up, accompanied by red LEDs on the tail lights. It didn't seem to matter which pack I used, but oddly, restarting the phantom seemed to cure it, until I swapped packs.

Any ideas? I recently used contact cleaner on the prongs, could this have left a residue?
 
I know everyone says to use contact cleaner on these pins.
I personally don't like contact cleaner. I never have, I don't know why. I have never trusted it.
I'm old and set in my ways. haha

I prefer a rubber eraser on the end of a pencil.
I have been cleaning contacts this way for years, not on my quad of course.
Rubber eraser followed by a short blast of air to get rid of the rubber eraser flakes.
The pins are easy, and don't forget their mate in the battery. you will need to cut an eraser down to fit in there.
sacrifice an eraser to save your drone!
 
Righto, update time.

I was slightly annoyed to find an invalid battery error when I connected to my phantom earlier. I tried another battery pack and had the same error, so I gave up and came home.

The pins are the 'castellated' (new?) type and they are moving normally, returning with spring pressure.

I took the shell off & the harness for the voltage pins is secure. Then I tried all four batteries in sequence and was surprised to find that the first battery I tried worked. Then the second. The third didn't. Then I realised the common denominator - the batteries that work are the old serial number, the ones that throw the errors are the newer examples (PH2-5200), which are only a few weeks old and don't have many cycles on them.

I have some deoxit arriving tomorrow hopefully, I'll give that a try. But the contacts look perfectly clean, and I'm confident that the pins are hitting the squares... so that leaves the electronics in the batteries as the prime suspect.
 
I treated the pins & battery squares with deoxit & left them for half an hour.

Now they all seem to be working normally :)

I'm about to properly flight test them, let's see!
 
I ran two packs down to 50% without a single issue. It would seem that the Deoxit gold does what it says on the tin.

Even though the contacts were fine to the naked eye, there must have been crud on there from when I used the WD40 contact cleaner a week ago. I won't be using that on the phantom again :)

It was an interesting session actually - I was within 100 ft of a police helicopter that decided to randomly fly up the valley, less than 200ft AGL! I couldn't get the orientation and camera angles right before it flew past. I wonder if the pilot saw the phantom.... I've been living in this area for almost 3 years now & I've never seen a heli run up the valley like that. It just goes to show why maintaining LOS is a good idea :)
 

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