Battery Error after take-off

[Khrattos]

Hello everyone!
I hope everything is fine with you and that your birds are flying safely!

Today I did a very long flight at a nearby beach, with no problems and record range for the P3P. Everything was perfect...

Landed, installed a fresh battery and took off. I was showing a couple of friends how to fly so everything was smooth and slow for the first minute or so. After that I got a Battery Error message flashing, the four lights turned solid red, and no battery percentage was shown, but the symbol was red. I got scared and took it back, landed it with the mentioned situation still going. The battery still showed full charged by its leds. When I tried to turn the battery off, the green leds did shut down but the red one (on the button) turned on. I pushed the button again and it turned off and no lights were present. So I took the battery off.

Here is the link to healthy drones log showing nothing wrong that I could find:

HealthyDrones.com - Innovative flight data analysis that matters

I turned the drone on again and went to the battery tab to find that the first cell is 0.04V lower than the rest of the cells. And confirmed that the battery is on its 10th cycle. I normally fly my batteries down to 20%, then use one of them to download stuff to my laptop, getting down to 18%ish.

May be I should drain the battery down to 8% and fully charge it back? May be that would balance it? If that was the problem..

Any help or advise is greatly appreciated and thanked in advance

 

[Khrattos]

Ok guys, I think I know what happened. I read the threads on this forum and was reminded of something: the problem might arise if the battery does not fully seat on the drone!

I remembered that one of my batteries has to be pushed a little bit hard in order for it to click and seat properly.

So I returned to see my stuff and surely enough the one with the issue today, was THAT battery. So I made some test and found out that this battery clicks two times in order to be fully seated. So I proceeded to shake the drone ay one click and I could reproduce the issue presented today!

I guess I was distracted while doing my preflight routine because there were two people with me and and did not the final battery check before taking off.

So there you go guys! 2 lessons learned:

-Never get distracted when doing your pre-flight
-The drone can take off with a poorly installed battery with no issues but will be faulty as it vibrate. So you better be sure that is correctly installed

 

[alokbhargava]

Good finding and happy conclusion.

 

[robinb]

Use a little silicon grease in the track each side of battery will greatly help with insertion and removal.

 

[Mark The Droner]

It's also a good idea to slap that baby in there like you're slapping in an M-16 cartridge. I learned that watching TTT Tom's Tech Time (although I'm not sure he used the M-16 analogy)...

 

[Drone Diva]

My friend has a P3A that is having this problem. It seems to only be one particular battery. He flew a few minutes and the battery error came on and all lights went red. He landed right away. Is there anything we can do PRIOR to flight to recognize if this battery or fitting is not right? Should we retire this battery? It only has 10 flights on it.

 

[Mark The Droner]

I would take a close look at the cell balance.