Smallest battery

What's the smallest battery you could fly a 450 with?

Could you fly a 1500mah 35-70c batt? Could this deliver enough power to fly it for a minute or two?

Just curious if it's possible or if it would be foolish to even attempt.


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econfly

Member
Yes, that should work assuming a light build and power system optimized for the load. I think you could do more like 6-8 minutes of flight time.

Details: For a light build with no camera or gimbal, say you have 300g for the frame and light landing legs, 300g for motors/esc/props, and another 100g for flight controller, etc. That's 700g total or 175g/arm. Say that 1500mAh battery comes in at around 150g. Total weight per arm would be about 210-215g. Assume you pick the motors and props right to get nice efficiency -- typically a maximum of about 10g of thrust per watt. That means you need a little over 20 watts/arm to hover. Call it 100 watts total for gentle flying. At 3s power, 100 watts is just under 10 amps. A 1500mAh 35-75c batter can easily provide 10 amps (even 25C would be more than enough). Assuming you use 90% of battery capacity your hover time is 90% * 1.500Ah / 10A * 60 minutes/h = just over 8 minutes. That's the best case. More likely is a few minutes under that with gentle flight, say 6-8 minutes of flight time.

Another way to think of it is that 210-215g/arm or about 850g all up weight is just a little over the weight of a Phantom 1 with a 2200mAh battery. But on this hypothetical 450, the 1500 battery has about 70% of the capacity of the Phantom's 2200 battery. So you should get something like 70% of the flight time of a stock Phantom 1 -- again, about 6-8 minutes depending on how you fly it.
 
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PeteDee

Mr take no prisoners!
Zippy do a compact 4S 1550mH pack that would easily fly a 450 for 4-5 minutes, just keep it light.

Pete
 


I couldn't believe the flight time with this tiny battery! Just a little less than the 5000mah! Crazy.


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jbrumberg

Member
There's a good chance it was due to the decreased weight of the battery and as a result the decreased AUW. Decreasing weight should increase flight times so even with less battery capacity there would be gains in flight time from decreasing AUW. Out of curiosity did you input the new battery data into eCalc and compare against old battery eCalc predictions?
 

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