A drone is useless without a battery. All motors, flight controllers, radio, and processing require power. But it is not a wise decision to use the heavy battery to fly your drone because most of the energy will be spent on the thrust of a drone to fly. So, we need to choose light but powerful batteries. In a drone, we usually use lithium polymer batteries.
Choosing the right battery for the drone is one of the most critical things. Before choosing batteries for your drone, keep the following things in mind:
- Battery size and weight
- Battery discharge rate
- Battery capacity
- Battery voltage
- Battery connectors
You can easily calculate the continuous current output of the battery with the help of the following formula. If the current is I, battery capacity is C, and discharge rate is D, then the instantaneous current draw is I = C X D. So always choose the highest capacity batteries, depending on the size and weight of the batteries. The LiPo, or Lithium Polymer battery has cells. Say you have three cells in your battery and each of them is 5,000 mAh and the discharge rating is 10 C.
So, the current draw is:
Here, we converted mAh to Ah by dividing by 1,000. The following figure shows LiPo batteries for a drone:
