Betaflight-configurator: Battery low indicator in the configurator

[Etruscian]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When working on the bench, I usually have a battery connected. I have set up all the settings in betaflight so that it watches my battery voltage. Since the configurator does not show these warnings, but does show a green battery bar if a battery is connected, I've almost killed a lipo because I watched the green bar instead of the voltage.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like the green battery bar to turn red when the connected battery is almost empty when attached to the configurator. Maybe also a warning popup or something like that

Describe alternatives you've considered
I've thought about battery voltage meters but since I don't have one, I'd like to have this feature in the configurator/betaflight. Since I also didn't have a receiver connected, I had no other way of giving me a warning.

PS: I didn't know if this was the right place for this kind of feature request. If it isn't, please tell me where I should put it and I'll happily close this request

[etracer65]

It is not recommended to have the battery connected while connected to the Configurator. Settings changes can result in some states that cause the motors to spin unexpectedly or uncontrollably. Connecting the battery while using the Motors tab to test motors or to check receiver function on the Receiver tab is okay if kept to a minimum.

[Etruscian]

That is what i did. I wanted to test the new firmware on my escs, so I connected the battery, went to the motors tab and fired them up. I didn't notice that I connected an almost empty battery and after a minute, I noticed the voltage had dropped to around 12 volts (4s). A warning would have been nice since my flight controller knows that the voltage is low.

[etracer65]

I'm not really sure what more is needed.

[Etruscian]

My proposition would be for the battery icon to flash red or something. If I'm testing my motors (checking rotation and things like that) or escs, my attention is not with my battery voltage. A flashing icon would draw my attention and prevent a potential dangerous situation.

[IvoFPV]

I guess since we already have the voltage and cell detection in the configurator we could display a warning dialog or flash the icon when battery goes below set minimum battery cell voltage.

[etracer65]

Moving this to the proper repository.

[McGiverGim]

@Etruscian in theory, it must turn red:

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight-configurator/blob/2395c7a216ca0302554300c5af36d290ffec0391/src/js/serial_backend.js#L649-L680

It is done in a manual way (now we have better MSP commands to do this than the old ANALOG) but it must work.

The only problem I see is that it shows a red bar when it is in warning range, but if it is under the minimum there is no bar to show, because it ranges only from minimum to maximum..

[Etruscian]

@McGiverGim the weird thing was that I did see a green bar that was almost full. Could this be that because the battery was empty before plugging in, it mistakenly was recognized as an overly full 3s?

[mikeller]

@Etruscian: Did you calibrate the voltage meter in the firmware? They can be considerably off.

[McGiverGim]

@Etruscian the code divides the voltagedetected / vbatmaxcellvoltage to get the number of cells. If it detects the wrong number of cells yes, it can go wrong.

I will push a change to blink when the voltage is under minimum, but if the cell count is not correct, I can't do nothing.