LiPo not working with FC

[Cryztal]

Hey all,

I finished making a drone a couple months ago and am having some issues. When I finished the drone I was using one of my friends batteries to test it and I had everything working and configured in betaflight. Recently, I have just bought a 1500mAh battery and for some reason when I plug it into the drone, the esc’s don’t connect to the fc but sometimes when I have a USB cable connected in betaflight and the battery is connected, the esc’s connect. I have a power adaptor for my battery charger that has a XT-60 output and when I plug it in through that (I know it’s not a very good idea but it works...) the esc’s connect and everything works perfectly. On the odd occasion that the esc’s do connect with my battery plugged in, whenever I try to spin up the motors, they just do an odd twitch rather than actually spinning. I have already updated my firmware on my FC and made sure I am using the latest version of betaflight.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[tevek]

Hey all,

I finished making a drone a couple months ago and am having some issues. When I finished the drone I was using one of my friends batteries to test it and I had everything working and configured in betaflight. Recently, I have just bought a 1500mAh battery and for some reason when I plug it into the drone, the esc’s don’t connect to the fc but sometimes when I have a USB cable connected in betaflight and the battery is connected, the esc’s connect. I have a power adaptor for my battery charger that has a XT-60 output and when I plug it in through that (I know it’s not a very good idea but it works...) the esc’s connect and everything works perfectly. On the odd occasion that the esc’s do connect with my battery plugged in, whenever I try to spin up the motors, they just do an odd twitch rather than actually spinning. I have already updated my firmware on my FC and made sure I am using the latest version of betaflight.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well if you’ve plugged in your battery charger (just for testing and nothing else) you have probably ruled out the xt60 connections to the board as being ok. It may be you have a suspect battery and it certainly happens if you can rule out the fact that the charger is actually charging the battery (I’m assuming that you have a 4S 1500 mAh battery charging at 1.5A to bring it up to charge).
If your battery is flat (check with a multimeter) that would give you the symptoms of the FC and ESCs not giving you the normal 5 chirps and your motors not spooling up.
Having said that I always leave the firmware the same on my quads unless there is a performance issue with the quad. Hopefully you saved the original FW file in the the CLI tab before you upgraded it just in case you need to go back. I am running FW 3.5.7 on a lot of my gear using BF 10.6 and it’s fine.

 

[Cryztal]

I doubt the problem is the firmware version due to when I use my charger it works perfectly fine. I use the lead to power my charger and I charge the battery with that. My battery was fully charged at 4.2v a cell and when I plug it in it detects it as a 4s battery in betaflight. When I plug the charger into my drone it detects it as a 3s battery. I dont know if this info helps...

 

[NeoCloneOne]

I am assuming the ESCs are running either Blheli_s or Blheli_32 firmware, but do you get the 3 startup tones on battery plug in? That would mean they are fine. Is your quad level when you are testing (props off of course)? Also, do you calibrate your accelerometers with the quad on a level surface? Test your ESCs in Blheli_s or BlHeli_32 software (you need the battery connected) to see if you can spool up the motors smoothly. Check all of your solder joints (to ESCs, XT60 at FC, motor leads to ESC pads). Cold (bad) solder joints can cause intermittent connecting. One more thing, check the XT60 connector from FC, make sure the the terminals are closed tight (it could be opened slightly enough to lose connection to the battery intermittently). Another thing, if your charger is showing 3s when connected in BF then maybe it is only charging 3 cells and one cell in the battery could ot be charging and may have gone bad. Use a good battery meter to check each individual cell of the LiPo to make sure each cell is good. Hope this helps.