This is very enlightening and helpful Peter. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of Zino users like me who simply use the Hubsan supplied charger. As you stated, when you start seeing a degradation of flight time, it is clearly best practice to retire that battery. I suspect I have been living on borrowed time with my original Zino battery as I'm getting less than 10 minutes flight time with it now. After seeing this demonstration, that original battery is officially retired. Thank you!
Thought the bed was going to take off for a second there! Thanks for your desire to keep us Zino owners informed about issues that matter to us. It’s apparent you do your homework and want to give us the most accurate info available. Keep up the good work,
This happened to me in June. My Zino was from the first shipment and the battery that failed was the original that came with it. I had probably recycled it well over 100X. It happened exactly as you described, within 5 minutes of take off. Unfortunately for me it was at 100 meters altitude over an inaccessible railway right-of-way and although I could not get to the site I could see the craft was in pieces.
You've been telling me to retire my original battery. Consider it done. The last time I flew with it, I only got 9 minutes of flight time, no doubt a catastrophic failure would have been right around the corner. All of that said, a new battery is only $35 on Amazon.....cheap insurance I'd say.
Would it be fair to say that 150 flights is what you should expect with the Zino stock battery? Also, is that little digital battery cell reader reliable? What is it called and where can you buy it? Thanks for making this video. It will help many first time Zino owners.
Hi Peter - a funny thing - I watched this video when you first uploaded it, just as i was purchasing a Zino Pro. Itmeant absolutely nothing to me at that point, as I was a total noob. Watching it today it made total sense, and as soon as my charger is delivered I will be testing my battery that has been charged with the supplied Hubsan one. Obviously the zino is a model engineered down to a price - its excellent flying abilities, gimbal, and camera appear to have sucked the budget away from the battery/charger! So in reality we have to add the price of a decent charger to the cost of ownership, making it less of a bargain. My Zino Pro has performed well so far, so i am happy. Will be happier when i can perform some of these checks! Great post. Thanks for the info.... Wonder how the "big" battery will check out????
Thanks for all your Zino info Pete! You clearly have a radio/electronics background. Do you build those musical instruments too? What are they? Any ideas about this one... Two fallen angel crashes with Zino1. Two different batteries. Good flights over water in between! (Jammy!) Gimbal flicks up to top corner. Gimbal warning comes on screen. Seems to start coming home. Crash lands. Position read out still updating (so easy to find drone). Drone lights still on. Thanks in advance!
The instruments are cigar box guitars. Yes I build and play them. SOunds more like your quad is being tilted beyond the limit of the gimbal, either wind or a bird perhaps. Without seeing video and looking at the pitch and roll angles it's hard to say.
Great video. I had same issue with Hubsan H501S.... All Batts fully charged, took off and 2 mins into flight she fell from sky and smashed int ground. Hope this does not happen with my next purchase as getting a used Zino but has all software upgrades.
Yes the 501 batteries perform similar. That is the reason I ditched all Hubsan batteries and only used alternative manufacturers without battery protection :-)
Very informative. So basically simply change batteries after about 100 charges just to be safe. But watch for any cell charging at near 4.35 right out of the gate.
GM, You may not get to100. 🙁 But yes, watching for 4.35 straight out of the gate is a good indicator to be alert! I'll do a short summary video when I get a bit of time. Unfortunately if it fails in the air, it may be too late to worry.
This can be fixed by Zino headquarters or factory to lower the raise altitude to a lower power lift speed Leading to a lower current transfer draw, the developers didn’t check if you combine both acceleration and altitude it can cause double the power draw to to current insufficiency to shutoff in mid air due to lack of power
It shuts off because of high IR in the batteries and an unsuitable and unneeded battery protection circuit. It can be fixed by anyone by not using a Hubsan battery, or if they wish to use one, by bypassing the protection circuit.
are you sure it's a battery problem? for me the problem is that with the motors at maximum not detecting movement of the accelerometer the motors are in protection!
Sorry I'm not good at all in electronics. Bought the same charger to follow battery capacity as my Zino crashed from more than 20 meters following a battery failieur. Do you have additionnal cable adapters to plug Zino batteries with that charger? Your video is not showing how you plug them for the test
Two faults in your testing. 1. You are using the Hubsan adapter which is barely worth more then the powder required to blow it to Hades! I have found that it GREATLY adds to the resistance readings. I purchased a 6 pin laptop connector that fits the battery and did my testing with an adapter made using a 3S extension with 22AWG wire. You should tear apart the Hubsan adapter to see the TINY wires it uses. 2. Yes, your first battery is failing - but is it weak cells or is it a fault on the protection PCB. The only way to tell is to open the battery and bypass the PCB which I have done on one. Then retest the battery to see what happens.
I do the IR tests with completely different setup. The entire purpose of the video is to show what basic steps can be done for those without access to test equipment! If anyone is going to the effort to split open their battery, I'd recommend removing the battery protection circuitry regardless of the cell conditions. It is an unnecessary liability and creates nothing but grief...
The Accucell S60 is normally around £26 from hobby King. There are many other similar ones on the market, e.g. SKyRC S60 ids the same device . ISDT units get good reviews too.
I had the same experience with my original battery. The first time it died at 3ft over the grass, so the next time I tested it at 3 feet. It failed again. I hope the newer ones are more reliable.
I'm here because my Hubsan Zino fell out of the sky this morning from about 60' less than 2 minutes into flight on a fully charged practically new battery with less than 5 flights total. Fortunately, I was over land but I was 10 seconds from flying over a lake. Not worth the risk owning this quad in my opinion as now I have to worry every time I fly the damn thing. And going through a battery voltage/resistance test every time I want to fly is ridiculous. No thanks!
I found out the problem every battery has a 100c, 50c, or 30c, rating this drone must have have a 20c battery for example don’t worry about the amp on the battery it’s the discharge rate speed, and as u can see it can Accelerate but when the guy try to raise altitude more current is needEd causing a unexpected shut off, the fault is not in the drone, it’s the not the battery either, it’s not the amp, but the poor discharge speed leading to to the final conclusion it’s using slow and cheap quality discharge rate battery
I'm afraid not. The max discharge peaks at around 15A (it averages at about 8A). That's only 3C. These batteries are capable of 8 to 10C. This issue is dead simple. The batteries have high IR and one or more cells simply dips below the low voltage threshold set by the protection circuitry. The simple solution is to bypass the protection circuit and the batteries are fine (well as fime as a high IR cell can be).
My answer is don't buy Hubsan drone. It's a junk. I bought last year and don't use much. May be about 10 times. I flied two months ago and dropped off from the sky 3 times. Now it trashes. It won't work anymore. I waste my $400 US. Every time I need to use it, it always asks for update software. It's very annoying. I will buy DJI in the future.
This is very enlightening and helpful Peter. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of Zino users like me who simply use the Hubsan supplied charger. As you stated, when you start seeing a degradation of flight time, it is clearly best practice to retire that battery. I suspect I have been living on borrowed time with my original Zino battery as I'm getting less than 10 minutes flight time with it now. After seeing this demonstration, that original battery is officially retired. Thank you!
10 minutes is a low time. That's the max length this video should have been however 😉
I'll do a shorter one cutting out the dross.
@@randoneur Nah, the video length was fine. It held my interest throughout. 👍
Thought the bed was going to take off for a second there!
Thanks for your desire to keep us Zino owners informed about issues that matter to us. It’s apparent you do your homework and want to give us the most accurate info available. Keep up the good work,
This happened to me in June. My Zino was from the first shipment and the battery that failed was the original that came with it. I had probably recycled it well over 100X. It happened exactly as you described, within 5 minutes of take off. Unfortunately for me it was at 100 meters altitude over an inaccessible railway right-of-way and although I could not get to the site I could see the craft was in pieces.
You've been telling me to retire my original battery. Consider it done. The last time I flew with it, I only got 9 minutes of flight time, no doubt a catastrophic failure would have been right around the corner. All of that said, a new battery is only $35 on Amazon.....cheap insurance I'd say.
Would it be fair to say that 150 flights is what you should expect with the Zino stock battery? Also, is that little digital battery cell reader reliable? What is it called and where can you buy it? Thanks for making this video. It will help many first time Zino owners.
Hi Peter - a funny thing - I watched this video when you first uploaded it, just as i was purchasing a Zino Pro. Itmeant absolutely nothing to me at that point, as I was a total noob. Watching it today it made total sense, and as soon as my charger is delivered I will be testing my battery that has been charged with the supplied Hubsan one.
Obviously the zino is a model engineered down to a price - its excellent flying abilities, gimbal, and camera appear to have sucked the budget away from the battery/charger!
So in reality we have to add the price of a decent charger to the cost of ownership, making it less of a bargain.
My Zino Pro has performed well so far, so i am happy. Will be happier when i can perform some of these checks!
Great post. Thanks for the info.... Wonder how the "big" battery will check out????
Thanks for all your Zino info Pete!
You clearly have a radio/electronics background. Do you build those musical instruments too? What are they?
Any ideas about this one...
Two fallen angel crashes with Zino1.
Two different batteries.
Good flights over water in between! (Jammy!)
Gimbal flicks up to top corner.
Gimbal warning comes on screen.
Seems to start coming home.
Crash lands.
Position read out still updating (so easy to find drone).
Drone lights still on.
Thanks in advance!
The instruments are cigar box guitars. Yes I build and play them.
SOunds more like your quad is being tilted beyond the limit of the gimbal, either wind or a bird perhaps. Without seeing video and looking at the pitch and roll angles it's hard to say.
Great video. I had same issue with Hubsan H501S.... All Batts fully charged, took off and 2 mins into flight she fell from sky and smashed int ground. Hope this does not happen with my next purchase as getting a used Zino but has all software upgrades.
Yes the 501 batteries perform similar. That is the reason I ditched all Hubsan batteries and only used alternative manufacturers without battery protection :-)
@@randoneur Could you please specify which ones? Thank you in advance.
@@snowman6705 alternatives?
Any if the GiFi ones, either the 3200 or 4200 mAh ones
@@randoneur Thank you very much!
Very informative. So basically simply change batteries after about 100 charges just to be safe. But watch for any cell charging at near 4.35 right out of the gate.
GM, You may not get to100. 🙁
But yes, watching for 4.35 straight out of the gate is a good indicator to be alert!
I'll do a short summary video when I get a bit of time.
Unfortunately if it fails in the air, it may be too late to worry.
Did you damage your camera or gimbal after that fall? It seemed like you were quite high when it failed.
Yes. Had a problem with the gimbal, but easily enough fixed. Just the usual cable retainer unlatched. All good now.
This can be fixed by Zino headquarters or factory to lower the raise altitude to a lower power lift speed Leading to a lower current transfer draw, the developers didn’t check if you combine both acceleration and altitude it can cause double the power draw to to current insufficiency to shutoff in mid air due to lack of power
It shuts off because of high IR in the batteries and an unsuitable and unneeded battery protection circuit.
It can be fixed by anyone by not using a Hubsan battery, or if they wish to use one, by bypassing the protection circuit.
are you sure it's a battery problem? for me the problem is that with the motors at maximum not detecting movement of the accelerometer the motors are in protection!
Sorry I'm not good at all in electronics. Bought the same charger to follow battery capacity as my Zino crashed from more than 20 meters following a battery failieur. Do you have additionnal cable adapters to plug Zino batteries with that charger? Your video is not showing how you plug them for the test
That happened to me last day!!! I bought a second hand Zino, I have to buy new batteries, I could save my drone!! Thanks
I subbed
Two faults in your testing.
1. You are using the Hubsan adapter which is barely worth more then the powder required to blow it to Hades! I have found that it GREATLY adds to the resistance readings. I purchased a 6 pin laptop connector that fits the battery and did my testing with an adapter made using a 3S extension with 22AWG wire. You should tear apart the Hubsan adapter to see the TINY wires it uses.
2. Yes, your first battery is failing - but is it weak cells or is it a fault on the protection PCB. The only way to tell is to open the battery and bypass the PCB which I have done on one. Then retest the battery to see what happens.
I do the IR tests with completely different setup.
The entire purpose of the video is to show what basic steps can be done for those without access to test equipment!
If anyone is going to the effort to split open their battery, I'd recommend removing the battery protection circuitry regardless of the cell conditions.
It is an unnecessary liability and creates nothing but grief...
Very pleased to note that Hubsan upgraded that adapter for the Zino Pro - They obviously agree with you.
where can i find the battery tester? the small led one
www.banggood.com/1S-6S-Battery-Voltage-Meter-Checker-Tester-Low-Voltage-Buzzer-Alarm-p-75520.html?rmmds=detail-left-hotproducts__5&cur_warehouse=CN
what is a fairly reliable and cheaper battery tester than the Accucell S60 which is £141 0n ebay ? Thanks for the video , very informative
The Accucell S60 is normally around £26 from hobby King.
There are many other similar ones on the market, e.g. SKyRC S60 ids the same device . ISDT units get good reviews too.
I had the same problem but my drone suvied the crash from 60m heigth.
Just happened Today what's the solution its said the battery is dead with a full charge how fell from the sky first flight for 2020
I had the same experience with my original battery. The first time it died at 3ft over the grass, so the next time I tested it at 3 feet. It failed again.
I hope the newer ones are more reliable.
I'm here because my Hubsan Zino fell out of the sky this morning from about 60' less than 2 minutes into flight on a fully charged practically new battery with less than 5 flights total. Fortunately, I was over land but I was 10 seconds from flying over a lake. Not worth the risk owning this quad in my opinion as now I have to worry every time I fly the damn thing. And going through a battery voltage/resistance test every time I want to fly is ridiculous. No thanks!
I found out the problem every battery has a 100c, 50c, or 30c, rating this drone must have have a 20c battery for example don’t worry about the amp on the battery it’s the discharge rate speed, and as u can see it can Accelerate but when the guy try to raise altitude more current is needEd causing a unexpected shut off, the fault is not in the drone, it’s the not the battery either, it’s not the amp, but the poor discharge speed leading to to the final conclusion it’s using slow and cheap quality discharge rate battery
The company must of done that to keep the cost down for a cheaper discharge rate current transfer to lower the cost
I'm afraid not. The max discharge peaks at around 15A (it averages at about 8A). That's only 3C. These batteries are capable of 8 to 10C.
This issue is dead simple. The batteries have high IR and one or more cells simply dips below the low voltage threshold set by the protection circuitry.
The simple solution is to bypass the protection circuit and the batteries are fine (well as fime as a high IR cell can be).
Now test on FC V1.2.05 I wonder if I can show you that there is something wrong with the battery?!
the batteries of the Zino are aging very quickly and do not have the capacity announced by Hubsan: bad quality, real capacity 2000 mAh
What are your views on the new legislation introduced by the CAA
An unnecessary piece of bureaucracy which will achieve nothing other than lightning the wallet of the resonsibe by £9 :-)
can i protect my zino by removing the protection circuit ??
Yes.
There are however aftermarket Zino batteries available and I believe they have no protection circuitry installed (TBC)
My answer is don't buy Hubsan drone. It's a junk. I bought last year and don't use much. May be about 10 times. I flied two months ago and dropped off from the sky 3 times. Now it trashes. It won't work anymore. I waste my $400 US. Every time I need to use it, it always asks for update software. It's very annoying. I will buy DJI in the future.
Imax B6