Power & Battery

Battery setup lives under Config ▸ Power. It selects the battery monitor, sets pack capacity and arming thresholds, and shows live pack telemetry. (This was its own Power tab until it moved into Config; the surface itself is unchanged, including its own Apply for the battery parameters.) Getting the monitor right is what makes everything downstream — the OSD readout, the remaining-capacity estimate, and the battery failsafe — meaningful.

Battery monitor

Select the monitor type, BATT_MONITOR, to match your hardware: 0 Disabled, 3 Analog Voltage Only, 4 Analog Voltage and Current (the usual analog power module), 8 DroneCAN BatteryInfo, 9 ESC Telemetry, plus SMBus/INA2xx smart-battery and many others.

Warning

BATT_MONITOR is reboot-required. After changing the monitor type, reboot the flight controller and re-pull parameters so the rest of the BATT_* settings appear for the new backend.

Capacity & arming thresholds

The tab exposes the pack’s BATT_CAPACITY (mAh) and two arming gates that block arming on a depleted pack: BATT_ARM_VOLT (minimum voltage to arm) and BATT_ARM_MAH (minimum remaining capacity to arm). Edits are staged as drafts and applied with Apply Power Changes.

A live readout panel shows measured voltage, current, remaining percentage, and capacity, with a health badge — use it to sanity-check that the monitor reads a sensible voltage before trusting calibration.

Note

The analog scale factors — BATT_VOLT_MULT (volts per pin volt), BATT_AMP_PERVLT (amps per pin volt) and BATT_AMP_OFFSET (the sensor’s zero-current output) — are not edited here. They have guided calibration cards on the Sensors and Calibration tab, which walk you through comparing the flight controller against a multimeter and a clamp meter. If the live readout above disagrees with a meter, start there.

Low-battery failsafe

The low/critical voltage and capacity thresholds (BATT_LOW_VOLT, BATT_CRT_VOLT, BATT_LOW_MAH, BATT_CRT_MAH) and their actions (BATT_FS_LOW_ACT, BATT_FS_CRT_ACT) are part of the battery failsafe and are configured on the Failsafe tab, alongside the other failsafes — not here. Accurate monitoring (above) is what makes those thresholds fire correctly.

For monitor wiring and the analog calibration procedure, see the ArduPilot wiki: Battery Monitors (Power Modules).