The old battery in the controller question

Joined
Sep 29, 2016
Messages
27
Reaction score
8
Age
81
Hello friends. I know this has been gone over before, but before I open up my controller, I'm wondering if anyone has come up with an answer to this question: Where can a buy a replacement battery for my controller on my Phantom 4 controller. Each entry in this forum on the subject, that seems to have an answer to the problem, has somehow jumped me to the Phantom 3 forum. That controller seems to have a one cell battery and you can apparently get a replacement battery with wires that have no connectors from Amazon!
Now I am reading about the phantom 4 having batteries with more than one cell? Won't the battery for the P3 fit the P4? I don't mean "fit" like fit in the space necessarily. I feel like that sending in the entire controller to replace a battery is beyond idiotic. If I can find any LiPo battery of the same voltage, I wouldn't mind drilling a hole in the case and running a wire through it and velcro the battery to the controller if I can't find an exact replacement size. In the past few years I have built half a dozen multirotors from scratch and have no problem with bogeying things up to make them work right. I can run a wire from a battery in my pocket to it's point of use.
I know that there are delicate parts in the controller, but I have had my other multi rotor controllers apart, installing a back light for my DX6i, and I have had my FrySky transmitter apart and find nothing that should prevent any careful person from working on them. So I haven't opened this one up yet because it just started improperly charging today, and in checking my purchase and looking at the dji forums I see that DJI makes no warrantee on any phantom purchased after August 2016 if it wasn't purchased from them. My purchase was from Best Buy, so I'm left to my own devices and I think that there must be another battery that will work.
It started out when I pulled it off the charger today and pressed the button to see that it was charged and was dismayed to see that it was only at 75% according to the lights. I plugged it in and it did what it is doing now. So I turned it on and started a flight, just to see how it was working and in less than 8 minutes it was giving me warnings. The beeper went off and the scrolling warning about a low transmitter battery showed up. Then I plugged it in and the first light blinked for about an hour and then stopped. I unplugged it and plugged it in again and it started with the first light on steady and the second light blinking and for a moment I had some hope, but the second light went out along with the first one in less than two minutes. Unplugging and replugging repeats the routine. It flashes for a minute or so and then they both go out. I have had LiPo batteries go beyond recharging with my Thunder Ace Charger and with some coaxing brought it up by charging it for very short periods with the charger set for a different type of battery until it had enough charge for it to respond to the LiPo setting and the battery recovered and I got a lot more flights out of them. My experience tells me that this is a battery failure. On an 8 month old battery, and I have less than 10 hours on the aircraft and probably twice that much on the controller through editing and watching the flights and sky pixel. The charger itself charges my flight batteries in their normal time so I'm not thinking that there is anything wrong there.
So please, if anyone knows the voltage of the battery that I am going to find when I open the case please let me know. If there is absolutely no way to match this battery, voltage wise, I guess I'd have to send it in but considering the risk and cost and time lost (to say nothing of all the unhappy responses from people who have shipped their equipment to DJI) I'd rather fix this myself. To have your thousand dollar equipment sitting idly by because a battery went dead, just perplexes me to no end.
Happy to hear any of your thoughts, and thank you for reading this. PhantomPilots is great!
MikeyP
 
BestBuy is definitely an authorized DJI dealer so you should have a warranty. Problem is that battery problems have a shorter warranty but that might only be with the removable AC battery.
 
Thanks DanMan, thanks David
I may have gotten a little ahead of myself, but I went to Youtube after I posted this and watched a guy dismantle his p3 and am now watching a guy opening a p4. Very helpful, but then it occurred to me to look on ebay for a battery and found a simple device that claims to charge both controller battery and flight battery at once, through the car battery. (bells going off!) With my charger plugged in the controller will control the P4. I'm thinking I can buy one of these little 12.00 gizmos and with a fairly long wire I could just sit next to the car and make my flight. Most of the time I do anyway. IT's limiting, I know, but at least I can do as I usually do and go to where I'm going to fly and the wife and I get our lawn chairs out and put up an umbrella and sit next to the car and fly. I just received my pack that fits the DJI case, so I can hike out to remote places to fly, so unless maybe someone comes up with a reason not to do as I am thinking, I'll let the pack collect a little dust while I solve my problem at my leisure and won't have to be flightless while my controller is off galavanting into strange repair shops. And maybe I'll find a reasonably priced used controller in the mean time, even a broken one (as long as the battery is good). I DID take my phantom out on a hike, day before yesterday, and wonderful as it was to be out in the desert, with no traffic driving by, and people stopping to ask questions and gawk at my stuff, It nearly killed me. I'm 74 and haven't been hiking in quite a while. My body may have suggested to my P4 battery that the power ain't there no more.
I really hadn't looked into this situation thoroughly until today, and I suppose I should have done a bit more investigation before posting my help question, so I guess I don't need anyone to tell me about what voltage it uses.
So now, what do you think about my thoughts on this car charger ?
eBay item number: 282143666810
I'm not an electronic whiz, so maybe adding a steady charge to and using a battery at the same time isn't such a good idea.
thanks again.
 
I don't think the charge port is designed to accept enough power to run the controller, let alone the car charger having enough power to do it. But I am guessing. Since the normal run time is longer than the charge time, might work.
 
The DJI Specs page shows this for the receiver battery:
Battery 6000 mAh LiPo 2S
Operating Current/Voltage: 1.2 Amps @ 7.4 V

I had mine broke open at one time for something else and never took off the battery cover, but I did get a photo of it.

GL300C RC Battery Area.jpg


Notice there are two red wires and two black ones, and no third balance wire as with most Li-Po's. Could be just a couple of 3.7 volt 6,000mah Li-Po's tucked under there? Might also explain why some cannot get it to fully recharge if one cell is bad. You'll have to pop the white cover to see what can be found to fit.

I did find this one, but don't know if it would work and it's not cheap either: Spektrum 7.4V 2S 6000mAh LiPo Battery Receiver Pack | eBay

Good luck.
 
If the pairs of wires are to individual batteries, one can get 2 3.7v 6000mah batteries. Might be cheaper.
 
Looking at the pic posted you could get a 2S 6000mah LiPO from any supplier and just use the balance tap wires to splice onto the DJI harness and plug (solder and heat shrink). The only reason this might not work if the cells need to be isolated (balance leads will have three wires not four with a centre tap common to B+ and B- between cells).

Won't be hard to find a pack with the same dimensions.
 
Looking at the pic posted you could get a 2S 6000mah LiPO from any supplier and just use the balance tap wires to splice onto the DJI harness and plug (solder and heat shrink). The only reason this might not work if the cells need to be isolated (balance leads will have three wires not four with a center tap common to B+ and B- between cells).

Won't be hard to find a pack with the same dimensions.

I'm thinking they may be two 3.7v batteries as well and not one 7.4v, and might be why some only seem to have partial charges of the RC unit if one cell fails. Don't know where the balance wire is or if they even have them if they are a pair of single cells. The two reds and two blacks look like simple battery positive and negative wires and not the typical thinner balance wires which are not present in the photo.
 
I'm thinking they may be two 3.7v batteries as well and not one 7.4v, and might be why some only seem to have partial charges of the RC unit if one cell fails. Don't know where the balance wire is or if they even have them if they are a pair of single cells. The two reds and two blacks look like simple battery positive and negative wires and not the typical thinner balance wires which are not present in the photo.
The voltage and chemistry tells us it's two cells, no question. The extra wire (balance taps would be three by convention as you have no doubt seen with other packs) suggests it is likely there is no common connection between cells (as was my observation posted above). A simple multimeter could confirm if the cells need to be separately tapped (common + / - connection on board header would suggest no). Worst case you just peel the insulation off the battery and create the required four wire connection.
 
Well, you all have certainly given me a lot to look into. Here's a link to a dissection of a P3 controller that I found most interesting. This guy is way farther out on a limb than I would climb, but watching the things he did and what he learned saved me a bunch of learning.
Dissecting DJI phantom 3 remote repair
BBC Outdoors Mostly RC
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
My mind is swimming in all of this new information, but it is most helpful and I certainly appreciate you guys.

I'll make some trials tomorrow. I think you are right Dan man about not being to carry in as fast as it is using it up. But I'll try some tests on the premise tomorrow and just see how long it will run while plugged into the DJI charger.

As an aside, I was sitting here and heard a very muted beep coming from my controller. So I pulled the plug out of the charge port, which I left in after the last time it shut the lights off while charging. I plugged it back in and THREE lights were blinking. Not the normal steady lights and the one blinking, (or two) lights but before only the first light was flashing when they all went dark.. So I'm not sure whats behind that, but I'll leave it plugged in all night. It's softly beeping now -- about once every 2 seconds. Not a lot to lose. I'll keep you posted. Thanks again!!
 
Doggone it, The link I put in there was just to the ad that was playing. see if this works.:
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
.

Sorry about that. Sorry to waste your time. If this link doesn't work, I wrote in the title that I got in the search, so you can use that.
Dissecting DJI phantom 3 remote repair
BBC Outdoors Mostly RC
 
Sorry again-- now I show that you can watch it 3 times. Still, it's pretty entertaining[emoji16]
 
Here's a follow up on my problem. I decided to get another controller. I think there is no balance charger wire because each of the two single cell batteries feed into the plug that connects them to the controller inside the controller case. THAT is where the balance magic takes place, and Other than building a pack of 7.4 batteries and wiring them into that plug, there didn't seem to be anything I knew enough about to do much. I have a little sideline business of buying and fixing and reselling RC helicopters so I have a box of little 7.4 batteries. Enough to build a significant battery pack, but I want to fly tomorrow and another project just doesn't fit into my schedule. So I went to ebay (again) and started bidding on a pretty good looking deal on a controller. I am one of those guys who waits till the end on a slow moving bid situation, and wait till the last few minutes to see how fast the bidding goes then. It was picking up and somebody had an automatic bid working for them. So I started bidding with 10.00 bids to get above the auto bidder. Which I managed to do. There was the sign I was looking for "You're the highest bidder" So I looked to serif anyone else was bidding and saw that through no fault of my own, I'm sure, to bid above my bid someone would have to bid 13,060.00!!!! Wait!!,, I frantically tried to find a way to retract that bid. There is no way. And time ran out and I got that other announcement that I always (usually) love to see. "congratulations! YOU WON.
Someone else was doing what I do and at the last moment, they bid high. Higher than a new one. They were counting on nobody bidding that high too. So I ended up with a bid over 300 dollars! Well, I can't just pull an extra hundred out of my savings, beings as I am on SS, so I wrote to ebay and explained what I had done and told them that I couldn't afford to buy it at that price. ( I found a new one on a helicopter site) Then I contacted the seller and told him that I couldn't afford it. He said that he would contact the next highest bidder and offer it to him, but he didn't want to realist it because he was leaving the country soon. Well I knew that the next highest bidder bid more than he wanted to pay, figuring that nobody would bid higher than that, and I was right. He didn't want it. So the seller said that he would refund me a hundred dollars if I would pay the 200 I was wanting to be my highest bid. And that's how it ended. I paid 200 dollars for a used controller. I do a lot of business on ebay and they frown on defaulting on a bid, so it worked out. He was happy, I was satisfied and two days later the "new" (In a lot worse shape than mine)controller and after charging it up, I was in the air again.
So now I had a working controller. The old one still charged one of the two batteries and a little bit on the bad one, so I can power it up and it will fly the Phantom for a short time. The plug I didn't want to fiddle with drains the first charged one into the bad cell, so It will only maintain contact for a short while. I don't want to find out how long by flying with it. However, it works well enough to let me use it to test things on a problem that I had this morning. THAT problem is one I will be starting a new thread on today or tomorrow and has to do with a couple of incidents that I won't mention here. See you later.
And I sure thank you fellows for your response to my problem. One can figure a lot out by ones self, but it helps a bunch to be able to discuss things with like minded people, and I must say that the quality of responses on these forums is above those in the "other" forums.
Thanks again.
MikeyP
 

Recent Posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,357
Members
104,935
Latest member
Pauos31