How many of you use your own charge cable and charger to charge phantom 3 batts. And do you like it?

NoBiffBetter · Dec 8, 2016

I have a venom duo charger and had always wanted to make my own charge cable and try to charge my phantom 3 batt with my own charger vs dji.. For obvious reasons. Only reason I didn't was cuz I afraid to try it with out knowing for sure whether it would work or not.. Well little did I know ppl were already doing this

So the other night I was on YouTube and decided to give it a search, thinking "god there's gotta be some way you can charge these Phantom batts, smart batt or not, it's still a lipo!" Sure enough I found out how, and it's as simple as I had thought it would be. Just wasn't Ballsy enough to try it until I knew for sure. But now that I know, I will be def be making and buying my own charge leads and charging through my venom duo from now on. The best part is there's no more need to buy multiple expensive dji chargers for charging more than one batt at once and I will no longer need a dji car charger since my venom charges directly from an outlet or off a vehicle 12v batt.. Both a/c and d/c current. Which is great for being out in the field..

I was just wondering how many of you do this, and how's it been working out for you? Does the charge count still see it as a "charged cycle"? And have you had any issues from charging this way..

Also what's the highest you typically will charge at? I'm thinking around 6amps Max. But the best part is when I charge at night, or when I know I won't be using the batts for awhile, I can now be able to charge at a Lower amp such as .5 or 1 or 2amps.. This is great stuff and certainly is easier on the battery's themselves! Also no more trying to manually drain your batt down to balance, or wait 2 days for the batt to do it automatically.. I'll be able to just toss it in my venom charger at "discharge" or "storage mode" the battery till its at the level in which I want it.

So stoked

! Now I can't wait to buy more battery's, Spending less on chargers!

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NoBiffBetter · Dec 8, 2016

Oh and one thing I really want to find out is, will I be able to parallel charge with this charger and method? My charger can charge two batts at once normally, it's basically 2 seperate chargers in one. Cuz my plan is to eventually when I get 4 p3 battery's in total , to use one side of my charger to paracharge the 2 batts at once, then the other side to charge the other two battery's at once.. Thus charging 4 battery's at once using just this one charger. Just don't know if anyone has tried this, but i feel like it would be totally do-able.

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Darmie · Dec 9, 2016

I have often thought that this was a good idea and priced well

Battery And Transmitter Charger Plates 110-240V Input 4 In 1 For DJI Phantom 3

but it's only for AC use.

As far as parallel charging goes with your own rc battery charger goes, it's going to be hard to do with out some circuitry. Although your phantom battery is a lipo battery, the power input to the battery is not how one would normally charge a lipo. Since this is a smart battery, you only need to apply voltage (17.4) and keep that voltage from going over 7amps. The problem with attempting to parallel charge is, if you were to apply 14 amps on the power line, one battery may not draw 7 amps and then the other battery sees more then 7 amps and then stops charging. or something to that effect. So, with out a circuit on each battery connector, that would happen.

You could always buy a few of these.

17.5V 4A 70W Car Charger Outdoor Charger for DJI Phantom 3 RC Quadcopter

You probably would pay half that much on the battery connector anyway for your charger.

NoBiffBetter · Dec 23, 2016

Darmie said:
I have often thought that this was a good idea and priced well

Battery And Transmitter Charger Plates 110-240V Input 4 In 1 For DJI Phantom 3

but it's only for AC use.

As far as parallel charging goes with your own rc battery charger goes, it's going to be hard to do with out some circuitry. Although your phantom battery is a lipo battery, the power input to the battery is not how one would normally charge a lipo. Since this is a smart battery, you only need to apply voltage (17.4) and keep that voltage from going over 7amps. The problem with attempting to parallel charge is, if you were to apply 14 amps on the power line, one battery may not draw 7 amps and then the other battery sees more then 7 amps and then stops charging. or something to that effect. So, with out a circuit on each battery connector, that would happen.

You could always buy a few of these.

17.5V 4A 70W Car Charger Outdoor Charger for DJI Phantom 3 RC Quadcopter

You probably would pay half that much on the battery connector anyway for your charger.

Sorry it took me so long to reply back.. Iv been using the "venom charge cord" -for dji phantom 2 and 3 battery's. What I do is put my venom charger on lihv, lithium high voltage mode, and select charge.. This way the charger is not looking for the balance leads, which it doesn't need being that dji battery's have a built in balance board which does the balancing automatically so long as the charger is supplying 17v output.

Also the battery needs to be powerd on before charging or else the charger will see "connection error" and the charger will also display tbis message once the batt is fully charged because at full charge the p3 batt shuts off, sounding the "connection break" alarm on my venom charger. -which makes perfect sense being that there is no power going out of the p3 battery unless it's powerd on.

The charging has been going great, I was able to dismiss the myth that dji smart battery's will only accept only as many amps as its programmed for - 3.3amps I belive.. Because first I tried charging at a slower rate (which btw I love to do cuz it's much easier on the lipo cells) I charged it at 1.8amps and the battery took around twice as long to fully charge as it would if it was on the stock dji charger-3.3amps. So when I realized it charged slower I said, hmm, if it took less amps than the stock charger, then I'm betting it will allow for more amps than the stock charger.. So my next test I charged the phantom 3 battery again in lihv mode-charge- but this time I chose 4.5amps, the battery charges up again just fine, all the way topped off, and it charged full in much less time than the 3.3amp stock charger did.

These tests tell me that the dji phantom 3 battery will accept nearly any amperage given prolly (as long as it's with in reason) which is where want to try my next test.

My next test is to use two of the venom charge cables, plug one into each of my dji battery's (2) of them, and cut the bullet style connector ends off both harnesses , solder the power of the one harness to the power of the other harness-red to red and do the same to the grounds of each harness-black to black.. This will give me a paraharness or parallel harness.. Once I'm done with that I will solder on new Bullet connectors to each (now solderd togehrer) black and red wires, and plug them into my charger.. I would still use lihv, and the charge setting but this time for amps I would need to go much higher, since these two batts would now be in parralel this makes them like one big lipo adding the mah of both packs together.. 4480+4480=8960mah in total, I would prolly start my just charging it around .5c charge rate which would be roughly 4.4amps just to try it out..

If this works it's gonna be a life saver para charging is proven to be easier on your lipos, and a more efficient way to charge, as well as better balancing this is because of basic ohms law - two packs with resistance once connected in parralel will reduce the resistance , this meaning the charger will work less hard to charge multipul battery's than it would with one, also it would mean no more buying multipul chargers, or plugging in one batt waiting an hour , then in plugging and plugging in the next then restarting the charger again..

Let me know what you think about my plans, and testing. Hopfully I can find some free time to try the parallel charging out. Only thing that would concern me is the fact that once you were to try and charge at a 1c charge rate, even with only two battery's, that's now around 8.9amps, and I am unsure how the packs will Handle it, the fact that they have their own built in electronics is what makes doing this tricky.

But about what you said.. I don't think that one battery would pull more amps than another, if they were both connected in parallel then I feel like each pack should be at equal voltage and Amps, because after all, connecting multipul packs in parralel is just basically making one BIG lipo pack, the charger doesn't know the difference. But will the Intelligant flight battery? - that's my only concern

Tunes · Jan 6, 2017

I have been doing some research on this type of charging and its being done with great success.

Your Venom Pro Due charger is only rated at 80watts per side. The max you can charge a P3 battery at with your charger would be 5.2A which would be maxing out your 80W. Which is not recommended to max out your charger. DJI charger charges at 3.5A which takes about an hour or so from 20%. If you set you charger at liHV 3.5A it would take about the same. At 1C the P3 battery would need to be charged at 4.5A which would be 68.4W and charge alittle bit quicker. In which your charger is more than capable of doing. So you would be able to do two P3 batteries one per channel on your charger but thats about the max.

Now if you had a more powerful charger the P3 batteries are more than capable of being charged at a higher rate. To charge at 2C you would have to be at LiHV setting at 9A which would take 136.8W to charge it at that rate but it would only take about 30 min to charge.