Firmware: 1.15.2
Flight Controller: Cuav X7+
Crash Flight Log: Flight Review - Quadrotor
Thrust Loss Flight Log: Flight Review - Quadrotor
Batteries Tested: 4S Zeee 3200Mha x2 and 4S 3200Mhz Ovonics
Hey, we were testing a quadcopter drone last week, during early testing we found that despite using known good batteries the drone’s battery voltage reading would quickly drop to below safe values triggering an warning and automatically landing the drone. In situations where that didn’t happen thrust would often be too low and the drone could barely get off the ground even with full thrust, despite it working fine just a few weeks ago.
To resolve this temporarily we decided to disable battery voltage checks which would allow the system to take off and use the otherwise available thrust. This usually works fine despite being a roundabout way of avoiding the problem.
However in this case when flying the drone, the drone suddenly lost connection, fell and then crashed. based on the flight logs i think it was because the 5V power rail dropped dramatically during the takeoff to ~4V which would’ve caused the flight controller to disconnect and thus stop controlling the propellers. However the voltage regulator should be working, unless the input voltage is dropping to below 12 V which i don’t believe it is.
The batter related settings in px4 were set following the guide on the Battery Estimation Tuning (Power Setup) | PX4 Guide (main), ( I should also add that despite the guide saying that the system should remain at 100% for a few minutes before decreasing below that, we’ve often found that the apparent voltage drops significantly faster than estimates, meaning we usually drop to 40-50% during the initial minute)
The experts I’ve worked with that have more experience with PX4 and Ardupilot state that PX4 just has issues with batteries and power.
Any assistance on either resolving the low thrust issue , or resolving the dramatic battery voltage drop could be helpful thanks.
in the meantime may look into trying different brands of battery, but ive been told that this issue is quite far reaching anyway.