DJI drone battery

[Alex Fraser]

I mostly like the DJI batteries in my Phantom 3s.  They snap into the 
drone body and you can turn the power on and off with a button sequence. 
They can be set to auto discharge which is a great safety feature.  The 
batteries communicate with the drones main controller board and hence 
the battery charge is shown on your tablet on the ground which you view 
the camera feed on.   It all works well enough.  So what's the problem?

DJI is highly proprietary.  The protocol the battery circuit board uses 
to communicate with the main board don't follow any standards, well it 
follows DJI standards.  This makes it so if you want to replace the main 
controller  with a third party board the battery can't talk to the new 
board, also you can't use third party batteries on stock DJI machines.   
I was hoping someone would have created some code for an Arduino where 
it would sit between known protocols and DJI protocols and would make it 
all just work, but that apparently isn't in the cards.   It is 
surprisingly complex.
https://github.com/samuelsadok/dji_protocol?tab=readme-ov-file

Well it is beyond what I can figure out in any reasonable amount of time 
(12 monkeys with type writers...).  If I put another board in one of my 
Phantoms I will use standard batteries and add on boards to read power, 
all readily available.  This technology stuff sure changes faster and 
faster.

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