Some owners of DJI’s flagship sub-250 gram drone, the Mini 2, are reporting an issue with the its batteries. Apparently in some cases, these intelligent batteries are not discharging if left in the drone or the factory smart charger.
There’s no doubt the Mini 2 is an amazing drone for the company. With 4K video and the ability to shoot RAW stills all packed into a sub-250 gram frame, this drone is – hands down – the best available drone in its price category. With a maximum flight time of 31 minutes in ideal conditions, and video transmission range of 10 kilometers, there’s not really anything else out there that can touch it. We love this thing.
But, apparently, there’s an issue.
Battery discharging
DJI is generally great at battery management. If you have a fully charged battery sitting around, it will discharge itself to optimal storage levels. This helps maximize the life of your drone battery and also help ensure it won’t become unstable. You know that puffy feel that can happen to a standard LiPo if you don’t discharge? Well, trust us – that can happen inside the plastic shell that contains DJI batteries.
It’s an invisible process, and DJI’s batteries are programmed to simply carry it out. But there are a growing number of reports that the Mini 2 batteries aren’t doing this correctly – at least not when they’re sitting in the drone or in the DJI Fly More charger.
YouTube
A pretty succinct summary of what’s happening (or not happening) can be found in this YouTube video, courtesy of Ian in London:
Is this a problem?
Well, yes. If this is happening with your Mini 2, odds are it will diminish the overall life of your batteries.
As Ian points out, you can leave a fully charged battery sitting on its own and it will discharge. Problem with the Fly More combo is that the battery charger is also a very handy battery storage unit, and a lot of people simply leave their batteries in that device even while transporting.
We’ve dropped DJI a note to see if the company is aware of this issue and if there is a fix in the works. We’re inclined to think this could be fixed with a firmware upgrade. But then again, we’re not engineers.
Stay tuned. We’ll update this story if we hear something back.
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