Drone battery cycle
Also known as: battery cycle count, LiPo cycle
One full charge and discharge of a drone pack, counted by the aircraft because capacity and safety fall away predictably as cycles add up.
Updated
What it means
Every pack has a working life measured in cycles rather than years. The aircraft counts them, and after a few hundred the usable capacity has dropped far enough that flight planning has to change.
Intelligent packs report their own count, voltage spread and health, which is why a DJI pack behaves differently from a loose LiPo in a Freestyle FPV build where nothing is tracked.
Age matters as much as use. A pack left fully charged for months loses capacity without flying at all, which is why a storage charge setting exists. Cycles tell only half the story.
How it works in practice
Rotation is the practical answer. Three or four packs used in order age together, and the oldest one becomes the pack flown over open ground rather than over water.
Pilots who log flights notice the decline early, since a Drone flight log shows the same route ending with less charge than it used to. That is the signal to retire a pack.
Cold weather reads like a dead pack even on a healthy one. Cold-weather battery life is a separate problem, and warming a pack before launch recovers most of what the temperature took.
What to watch out for
A tired pack does not announce itself gently. Voltage sags under load, the aircraft decides to land, and a Return to Home (RTH) interrupts the pass that was being flown.
That interruption is what reaches the edit. The clip ends mid-move, and nothing in review can finish a shot the aircraft abandoned. A short pass is the good outcome; a sag over water is the other one.
Swelling is the point at which a pack stops being a filming question. A puffed cell is a fire risk and belongs in a disposal bin rather than in a bag with an aircraft and a GoPro.
How RawClip handles it
Clips that end mid-move are shorter than their surroundings and usually lose to complete passes during selection. Where a truncated take is the only coverage of a moment it still gets used, trimmed back to the part that reads as deliberate.