Quick change of battery size

[chriselsen]

As probably many other pilots I fly with different size Lipos. In order for DroidPlanner2's capacity based battery reporting to work, I therefore have to change the ArduCopter parameter BATT_CAPACITY before each flight (or at least every time I use a different capacity battery). That is very cumbersome. It would be great if there was a more convenient way for this.

Two ideas on how to improve this:
Option 1 (Simple):
While connected to the vehicle, allow to tap on the current battery voltage in the top status bar. This causes a popup, which shows the current BATT_CAPACITY settings and allows to adjust it via a slider and entering the value directly.

Option 2 (Full battery management):
Add the ability to specify all batteries used with basic data (serial number, name, voltage (cells), capacity). When connecting to vehicle, present pop up that lets the pilot choose among the specified batteries, which one is currently in the vehicle. Configure BATT_CAPACITY based on that selection. After flight, track used mAh and flight time for that given battery.
Allow to see statistics for each battery: Total cycles, flight time and mAh used (A and %). Average flight time and mAh used (A and %).
As battery management is probably one of the most crucial pieces of flying Quadcopter this would provide an extra value for pilots and make it unnecessary to use other apps (e.g. UAV flight log) for the same purpose.

[arthurbenemann]

Let's instead just display the consumed mAh from start. This can be calculated by (BATT_CAP_PARAMETERS*(1-PERCENTAGE_REPORTED/100))

[chriselsen]

I don't think displaying consumed mAh is a sufficient alternative. Many pilots rely on DroidPlanner2 reading out the remaining Lipo capacity in percent while flying. In fact, for many pilots (including myself) this is the number 1 reason for using DroidPlanner2.But for that capability to work, DroidPlanner2 needs to know the max batt capacity.

[squilter]

I totally understand why some might want this feature. But where's a good place to put the buttons?

[Thalek]

Somewhere in the Settings menu? That's assuming that ArduPilot (among others) even provides that usage information.

[squilter]

It's already changeable in the parameters menu. The point was to maybe make it easier to change.

[arthurbenemann]

This could be built into the vehicle profile

[arthurbenemann]

We are now displaying the consumed mAh in #1111. So if you know the battery size you are flying you can get an estimative. Or even better if you know how many mAh have you charged on your battery you know how much "fuel" you have left.

[dewgenenny]

I am not sure that this should be marked as closed - the point from the original Chris Elsen was that it would be great to have a way to quickly configure the battery capacity so that the announcements "80% remaining" etc are correct when using different battery capacities. He even highlighted a good method to access the configuration, namely by touching the current battery stats to access a slider. For sure, the capacity voice announcements are super useful when flying!

[arthurbenemann]

@dewgenenny An alternative solution was implemented, that's why the issue was closed. But we are certainly open for pull requests that do a different solution.