My journey to the world of quadcopters Part II - S3 quadcopter battery mod

After 2 motor burn outs :(, its about time to start doing something with the flight time. With just around 3 mins with the camera on board, i decided i need to do something how to extend the flight time. I was planning on buying a bigger mah battery but the delivery times i couldnt take. So instead i decided to just combine my 2 small batteries to get more flight time.

And to do this, requires some soldering skills. That is connecting the 2 batteris in parallel.

samle parallel connection

from 2s to 4s battery with two 850mah

You have to take note of the limited wire lenghts unless you have a spare jst connector.  To the left is how it looks like. with a total of 1700mah.


Now the problem is the battery tray, which can only house 1 battery. So again i moded the tray and cut the front part and rear for the 2 batteries to slide in. And as you can see in the picture, the 2 batteries fits in nicely. Any battery with max width of 30mm should be able to fit in. Probably a single 1600mah batt can also fit inside the tray.

moded battery tray

 
I made a test flight without the camera at 11mins before low voltage kicks in. and thats roughly almost twice my flight time with just one battery.

2nd test i did was with a camera + mount, and i get 6 mins of flight time before low voltage kicks in.

Below is some flight footages with battery mod. though i didnt fly it till low voltage coz i forgot to notice my quad was flying way up high and far at roughly 200m plus which is beyond the box suggested flying range.

 

 Next mod will be further reduction of my mount, probably removing my xiaomi yi battery and wiring it directly to the quad, and chaning my bushings to bearings (which i am still waiting to arrive).

Hopefully i will get additional flight time. else i will look into a different camera like runcam 2 which is lighter than xiaomi by alos 30g