I’ve just taken delivery of a Phantom 2, including Zenmuse H3-3D gimbal, FPV gear, and flight case. I bought it off eBay as “Spares or Repair.
Everything appears in good working order except for the battery which when metered had zero output, which is why it was sold as faulty. I’ve attempted to jump start the battery to a suitable level for the charger to recognise it but it appears one of the cells is completely dead as it maxes out at 8.4 Volt.
So the question is, could anyone still flying the P2 recommend a RELIABLE source of replacement P2 batteries? Plenty of eBay outfits selling third party examples, which I’m not against, but would appreciate a confirmed reliable source.
I have an original P2 - not that it’s flown in a long time … since the batteries became reluctant to hold a charge that gave as much as a minute’s flight, that is.
I’ll be interested to see what you get and your thoughts on the battery.
I’d like to get back to some full manual flying again.
I’ve taken a chance and ordered one from eBay. It should be here in the next few days. The cost was £45 including shipping. The seller, like many of the Chinese on eBay, claimed to be in West Bromwich but the tracking info shows it’s coming from Jersey.
Once it arrives I’ll test it and make my thoughts known.
These older type of “Smart” batteries are a bit of a misnomer. What they actually are is just a regular LiPo pack with a balance circuit and on/off switch.
I have another model from around the same era called the Ceewa S1, also sold as the Halo Pro Drone and Follower Drone. It’s actually not bad and uses Tarot electronics. It does use a similar battery to the P2, in fact the circuitry is near identical to that of the P2 just with a different board layout. I have two batteries for this model but one of them will not charge from the supplied charger due to fault in the balance board logic. However it’s a simple job to just remove the cover and charge with a regular LiPo charger.
I’ve yet to put any power through the P2 I bought off eBay but I can’t imagine any fault that would render it unworkable as they are relatively simple under the hood. Even in a worst case scenario of it being completely dead I’m still winning with the extras included for the price I paid. What’s that saying? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. That being the case my house is full of treasure, irrespective of my wife’s very vocal opinions.
It is possible to reset the logic on the smart board.
If you are able to put some charge into the LiPo using a regular LiPo charger you can then jump-start the smart/balance board.
The picture below is the underside of the smart/balance board. You can see four solder tabs on the right of the board. These are in decending order:
GROUND
VCC
TEST
RES (RESET).
If you can open the battery case and gain access to the red and black wires it’s possible to charge the LiPo with a regular LiPo charger. Once you’ve got the pack up to about 10Volt click the button so the red light under the red button lights. Next jumper the Ground and Reset tabs momenterally. This will reset the pack so that the charger will again recognise it and start the charge process.
I have removed the board from the dead battery supplied with my Phantom2. My intention is to wire an XT60 and balance lead to this board so I can use my regular 3Cell Lipo’s with the quad.
Just received the new battery, a few days earlier than expected.
Powered up the P2 for the first time and . Everything works great, including the gimbal. The only issue with the gimbal, which unlike my H3-2D on my Hex which connects to a Gopro via its rear connector, is that the ribbon that connects to the Gopro mini USB is broken.
Just doing a full charge on the new battery and if everything checks out in the Phantom 2 Assistant and the maiden flight I’ll be ordering some more from the same seller. Oh… And the battery came in its own little LiPo safe bag.
I was lucky to get one of the very last H3-3D gimbals with the back-plate connector for the GoPro.
That connector became the issue of some licensing issue with GoPro … because they were developing their own drone.
Typical Gopro, cutting their nose off to spite their face. It’s no secret that GoPro sales spiked with the introduction of the Phantom. And then to add insult to injury GoPro released a firmware update for the 3 and 4 models but withheld the info that it disabled the live video out via the mini-USB port, and thus preventing them from being used as FPV flight cameras.
Two more batteries arrived yesterday from the same seller with a Fiver knocked off for buying two.
After I gave the first battery a full charge I went out and did a hover test. This was somewhat disappointing as after 5mins the P2 went into stage 2 critical battery level alert with just one LED on the battery flashing. I connected the P2 to the assistant software and powered back up and this time three LED’s lit up and the assistant software claimed the battery was at 70% capacity. So I went outside and hovered for about 10mins before the P2 decided it was time to autoland. This time the assistant software claimed only 8% capacity but all three cells were hovering around 3.9Volt each. Rather than fly again I left the P2 flashing away in the corner for around four hours. The current draw was showing as around 700mA/H. After 4hrs the capacity had dropped to 5%. This tells me the batteries internal circuitry was well out of whack but with the deep discharge and recharge everything should be back to manufacturers specs.
Once the BT engineer has been today (landline has been out for a week) I intend to fit a telemetry module to the P2 and do another flight so I can monitor the dynamic voltage sag with the battery under load just to confirm all is now right with the world.
I’m a lousy videographer but I do get aroused by playing with the electrickery of the flying things.
I just bought a total of 4 x p2gopro drones with all kinds of accessories, including 10 batteries, 1 brand-new gimble system and a Boscam Rx-lcd 5802 ,7 inch FPV monitor 5.8g with a transmitter, also a DJI 5.8 GHz video link system, 5 DJI controller s, a bunch of GoPro accessories including a WiFi portable controller, 3 very good quality rigid drone transport cases, and alot of new props and guards and stuff like that. So I guess you could say that I am now a p2 flyer. I really appreciate your questions and answers on this model because I am new at this and am learning alot from reading your posts. I have a P3-advanced and a P3-pro that I am changing Yaw arm and ribbons on. this is a great hobby. Thanks again for your posts… Mike…Quebec,Canada
There’s still a lot of mileage left in these earlier models. Many will describe them as “old technology”, even though the P2 was released just six years ago. In actuality they’re using the same technology, same propellers, same motors, flight controllers that use the same components. The biggest change has been the software running on the newer models that provide a lot of the autonomy, but in some cases this can be detrimental as the manufacturer then has the last say in whether you can fly or not.
How are you doing today it’s great to hear from you and when you speak about autonomy with the newer drones you hit the nail right on the head. The main reason that I am buying up a few of these original DJI drones is because I am able to fly them,as we would say ,by the seat of my pants. I am a pretty good electronics technician from many years as a amateur radio operator and now that I am semi-retired I have taken up this drone hobby as a pastime and to keep me relaxed and busy. With my advanced model and pro model I was actually feeling a little bit bored and was not really learning to fly a drone manually, so what now I am fixing up a couple of these Phantom 2 drones with some older model GoPros that only cost about $20 and come with protective covers and all kinds of accessories for a very cheap price. I am running a little bit late on my schedule so I will get back to you later this afternoon. Now I am researching this whole li-po intelligent battery technology and need to buy a balance charger to verify all these DJI ntelligent batteries that I have so that I am able to build a couple of good batteries for the advanced and the pro models which I only have 1 battery for at the moment. The reason I actually started to buy the phantom 2 models was because I lost a Phantom 3 standard and a phantom 3 4K a couple of months ago and decided that it might be a good idea to practice with older model of drones. Now I am really interested in this Hobby because of the fact that I’m actually rebuilding drones which I find very interesting. We will be back in touch with you later today I really must get going and if you have any advice for a good model of battery balancer , it would be appreciated to have some advice on anything to do with the Phantom 2 drones. Thanks a lot and talk to you later have a nice day ,sincerely,Mike…
Yesterday was my first flying day of the year. I was able to test some new builds, some rebuilds, do a little 3D fixed wing, and put my recently acquired P2 and the new batteries through their paces.
In total I have three batteries, one I have done a full discharge to where the P2 assistant showed a terminal voltage of 9Volt (3Volt per cell) and 0% capacity. The remaining two batteries I charged to full capacity straight from the box.
First I flew the deep discharged and recharged battery. This provided around 20minutes of real world flight time (P2 carrying a Zenmuse H3-3D gimbal and GoPro). Next I flew the two batteries that I’d charged to full capacity out of the box. Both of the batteries went into auto land within a few minutes of take off.
Conclusion: Even though all three batteries were sold as new, and I have no reason to doubt that, I have no way of telling when they were manufactured or how long they sat on the sellers shelf. The built in balance and logic board was unable to determine the true capacity of the LiPo cells and suppose even after a full charge treated them as though they were still at a storage charge. Performing a deep discharge and recharge cycle, something DJI recommend every 20 or so uses, corrected this issue by recalibration the batteries internal circuitry.
So for other folk who still have a P2/P3 in their fleet but have not flown it for quite sometime, performing the deep discharge routine on the batteries may bring them back to life if you experience incredibly short flight times.
Hello Nudge. I started to verify my batteries and gave them a full charge (1 doesn’t charge,but I seem to remember seeing a post about a method 2 JumpStart the battery so that it has enough voltage for circuit to recognize that there is a battery. I can’t remember exactly how to do it though so I’m going to have to go and research this. Today I’m going to test them to see how much flight time I have. I definitely need one of these balance charger units so that I can take a couple of them apart and transfer the lippo’s into a couple of burned-out p3 batteries that I have. I’m having some difficulty to understand this assistant application and maybe you could send me the link of the exact app that I need to download so that I can perform some calibrations with the controller and aircraft. I removed the gimbals off of the aircrafts to do a good verification and clean them up. Could you please send me the link for the application that I need to communicate with these Phantom 2s! They are the regular Phantom 2s, not the Phantom 2 vision.
The correct application is the one you have on your screen, namely the PT2 for all the Phantom 2 range.
I would only recommend trying to jumpstart a heavily discharged LiPo if you are familiar with and understand how to treat different battery chemistries. Things can go very wrong very quickly if mistakes are made. Most hobby grade battery chargers will not start a charge if they detect that the terminal voltage is too low. In such a case I have always treated each cell individually by supplying a constant low current and a variable voltage bringing each cell in turn up to an initial storage charge level, and then watching to see if they can hold that charge without a load over a period of a week or so. If you were to try and bring up two or more cells simultaneously you run the risk of over charging one or more cells if one or more of the cells in the battery are unreceptive/faulty.
