JonMann
Senior Heliman
Location: Clayton, CA
| Bill,
Welcome to the world of ION's  (BTW, your Fury Extreme is still flying great, although I mostly fly my ION these days). Heard about your Raptor/ION model boo-boo, sucks whent that happens!!
I'm not positive about the answer to your question, but I think in heli mode it really doesn't matter whether it soft or hard cutoff. The difference is an immediate stop versus a slow spin-down of the motor with really no power), either way you are going to loose HS very fast and would need to Auto down in order to prevent something bad from happening. I don't think that if they gave you a soft cut-off in heli mode that it would give you enough power to really make any difference in trying to fly the heli down, I've had the soft cut-off happen with planes and the RPM drop dramatically when the ESC goes into cut-off. I really think it would have no value to keeping a heli in the air.
Obivously you don't want to run the batteries down so low that they would get to cutoff, and I check my pack voltage before each flight so I know where they are at (20.6/8v before first flight, 19.2/4 after first, before second flight). I actually set my cut-off to 2.8v, if the packs do get low, and you have a sharp burst of current, you could have a momentary drop in voltage that would be below 3.0v/cell - and this would not hurt the packs if it is momentary - but it does prevent a premature cut-off. By watching the voltage and the watching what the packs are taking with my typical flying, I am pretty confident that I would never fly them below 3.0v, not even getting close to that today. I know this will start some kind of debate, but it is the way I set it up and working well for me.
With the Actro 32-3 motor I am getting two 6 minute 3D flights and the packs are taking about 7200 to 7400mah to recharge and the pack voltage is still above 18v, so getting alot from the packs but not getting them too close to cutoff. JK flew my heli about two weeks ago, he was tearing it up and I had to ask him to bring it down cuz I knew it was getting real close to the end of the packs. Voltage on packs was 17.6v and they took 7800mah to recharge!!! I don't think you can get much closer to the end than that, but they still did not go into cutoff during flight.
-jon |
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