Charging the Phantom 2 battery from a 12v supply

There just needs to be a way to charge this battery faster. I'm charging my R/C 8th Scale Buggy Thunder Power 4S 5300 mAh LIpo at 2C (10amps) on a Hyperion EOSO720i and that takes about 40 minutes. My 2S 5300 mAh Lipo just take 20 minutes. Hopefully someone will come up with a mod for this.
 
AlexBell said:
Hi guys
Do you know if it is ok to charge P2 with powergorilla?
https://www.powertraveller.com/en/shop/ ... ergorilla/

It's a 12V power source so in theory yes, but how would you hook it up? I think even the car charger has built in algorithms for speed of charge to keep the battery safe. And also, you're probably hoping to get 5+ (P2 battery @ 30%) charges out of a 21,000mAh power pack but that's not quite how it works. The voltage output matters:
5V: 21,000mAh
8.4V: 12,500mAh
9.5V: 11,052mAh
12V: 8750mAh
16V: 6562mAh
19V: 5526mAh
24V: 4375mAh

So effectively you'd only get at most 2 charges at 12V using this device on a 20-30% phantom 2 battery after considering conversion losses. Someone chime in if I'm wrong because I have a 26,000 intocircuit that works great for recharging the fpv screen and other stuff but wasn't planning to hook it up to a flight battery.
 
Imax makes a pretty good line of 12v chargers for Lipos. The single units are inexpensive. I have an Imax Quattro that chages four Lipos at a time and it ran about $100.
You DO NOT need a LI-poly charger! Just a 12v power supply. The "charger" you have, that came with your drone, is just a 12v power supply. Charging intelligence is in the battery.
 
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I didn't want to ramble more in my post, but the "smarts" of the vision battery wouldn't be able to handle to amount to current the car battery can provide. The balancing taps and load used to balance the lipo wouldn't be able to use the current that the battery has available, and until the voltage of the lipo and "power supply" (battery or PSU) is matched, current will flow from the one with higher voltage.

If you put a 5a fuse between the batteries, it will just blow when the batteries are connected. The charger on the battery isn't a charger, it's simply a balancer and stops the cells from overcharging, but like all electronics, it will have a current limit it can handle, given the stock charger is 4a, I'd be surprised if the balancer on the battery could handle any more than 8a.

Also, the spade pins on the battery are always in connection with the lipo, there is no way for the battery to disconnect the terminals. The dji dumb charger and a car battery are both power supplies, the difference is, the dji PS has a 4a limit, where as a car battery has no external limit on the current it can supply, and the last time I tested my RX8 battery, it spat out 1,008 Cranking Amps (cranking amps is short term/high draw rating).
I hooked phantom 2 batt directly to 12 car batt, it worked, car batt was low so I hooked it up to an old style auto battery charger (17v I think not under load) and had the phantom batt hooked up as well, it seemed to be fine, but after powering everything up my camera and gimbal were not working, checked output of battery, it was 14v, I ran the quad to bring the voltage down and it all started to work again, Be carefull!, I am now trying to charge off a 12v 7a gel cell, we will see what happens.
 
You DO NOT need a LI-poly charger! Just a 12v power supply. The "charger" you have, that came with your drone, is just a 12v power supply. Charging intelligence is in the battery.
I tried with a 12V / 2A power supply adapter from my fiber optics modem and also with the 12V / 10A from an ATX 350W PSU (also tried black/yellow 12,2V / 15A).
My Phantom 2 battery just keeps blinking the first led but does not increase, it's been almost 1 hour and it's still blinking only 1 bar.
I've measured current flow with a multimeter and it reads ~436 mA of current flow.
How can I know it's charging ? Maybe I'm doing something wrong here?

EDIT: After a few minutes it stops blinking completely, all lights off. Seems not to be charging, I think the output of the power supply must be at least 12.6V for it to charge...
 

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6 years! There should be some kind of record board for digging the oldest posts.

EDIT: After a few minutes it stops blinking completely, all lights off. Seems not to be charging, I think the output of the power supply must be at least 12.6V for it to charge...

Nothing really surprising. The battery board does not have boots circuit, and voltage at fully charged single not-HV LiPo cell is 4.2V.

Looking at older posts in this thread:
* If your 3S (ie Phantom 2/Phantom 3/Mavic 1) battery sips more than 8 amps, it would overheat in minutes. There is a protection circuit which should disconnect the charging; but taking so much current basically means that the switching circuit doesn't work properly, and either the battery is flat to the point of being damaged or the charging voltage is way too high.
* If your battery starts charging with low current (0.2-0.8 amp), then it's either near to empty or near to complete charge. Especially for empty batteries, chargers often start slow as empty batteries are less chemically stable. But if the battery gets charged even a small amount, then at some point (often after considerable time - up to 8 hours) it will reach the "safe" voltage and start charging normally.
 
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