My quad copter draws 650mA just sitting

Hardware Pixhawk family
1

Is it about average for a Pixhawk quad to draw 650mA?

I have the following
Pixhawk and it’s standard components (mavlink, gps and so on)
Receiver
Runcam split 2s
Osd
Video transmitter

2

Sounds okay to me. The radio links (telemetry and video) can sometimes eat up a lot of power. Some GPS units will also use more current as they track more satellites.

3

Thank you.

Is there a way to maybe reduce this consumption? Maybe let the telemetry send less often? Maybe reduce the satellites? I didn’t change my video transmitter, it is at the default power output. I want to say 3mW.

Is it even possible to half this consumption?

4

I’d guess you have a linear voltage regulator somewhere, probably in the osd or vtx, that’s burning down voltage via resistance. If you want to find where the current is being used, easiest is to find which component is getting hot.

5

Makes sense. I will start to debug and report my findings.

I do know my OSD gets hot, but not toasty, but I give it 5V already from the video transmitter on the one side and 12V on the other side. The Runcam 2S camera itself also gets hot and the PCB. It actually shuts down when I have it on the bench.

The video transmitter is a small sun. It gets so hot I can’t actually glue it down with hot glue. I give it 12V. I think it will take 6V to 20V. I don’t currently have anything below 12V to give the transmitter.

I will have a look with my FLIR camera to see what all the components are doing. Are there video transmitters out there that have better voltage regulators?

I might need to setup some way, maybe with a servo/relay to cut the power to the whole video system and only activate it when I am ready to film and then shut it down again when I have the gimbal on target. Since we can’t really use FPV in Australia the FPV part is just there so that I can make sure what I want to film is being filmed.

6

I replaced my Runcam split 2s with the Ant camera from Caddx because I am working on reducing weight

The current draw on the table went from 600mA to 150mA.

The image from the camera seems to be about the same quality so if anyone needs to reduce weight and current draw I can recommend it.