SKYRC BD200 Battery Discharger & Analyzer For RC LiPo Battery

I'm giving this 4 stars because it does what it's supposed to do and is professional looking and sounding. A 200W discharge is just awesome and it's saving a lot of time. Beyond that, most of the design decisions were downright odd. Firstly I feel like I'm going to get carpal tunnel spinning those knobs. Very difficult to get to a standard amp draw. Secondly, if this is a battery analyzer, why won't it tell me the mah discharged at the end? It just flashes voltage it saw when it stopped the discharge, not the current voltage. Thirdly, the computer interface has sliders with the opposite problem from the knobs. You can get to a value quickly, but not accurately. Also, it guesses, badly, how many cells are connected. Fourth, the final voltage is way higher than where you set it, because batteries recover. It should take that into account. Fifth, a unit at this price point should balance dischcharge at the end. Sixth, uh oh, only one firmware update since it's release nearly a year ago. My soldering iron has a firmware release every few weeks. Bad sign.All that makes it sound like I'm not satisfied. I actually am pretty happy with this unit. I just hate it when engineers don't know their market and miss so many golden opportunities. This is a good product that could have been great, perhaps with no more manufacturing cost.

Software is very buggy and the output formatting of the text file is useless. The Xcel file output is only in increments of 30sec which isn't very useful for a 300 sec discharge. Setting a discharge voltage cutoff below 6.2v in software results in erratic behavior. As noted by other reviewers, the dischrage current is not accurate. 15A is actually 16A as verified by a Hitec 50A DCCT. The voltage measurement is a bit crude for 2s use, 20mV resolution. Voltage cutoff is not remembered from use to use which is annoying. For the money, I would also expect the device to measure the internal resistance. I dont believe it does or I can't find it in the software. Overall. I put this device a little bit above 1157 tail light bulbs and a relay.

It seems to discharge them adequately. I like to store my batteries to about 3.8 volts per cell. The charger requires that you do the multiplication so if I want to discharge a 3 cell battery to 3.8 volts per cell, it seems I should set the desired outcome to 11.4 volts. In practice this doesn't discharge the battery enough. I have found that setting the volts desired to the min voltage specified on the pack gives me discharged batteries at between 3.75 and 3.8 volts per cell. So if the battery says 3S 11.1v, I set it to 11.1 and get what I want. This does not balance the cells. It stops when it hits the set voltage and does not check individual cells. It is convenient that it only uses battery power for operation.

I bought this after reading some reviews online and a couple of Youtube videos and was not disappointed. I use this to discharge all my drone and Traxxas RC batteries and it worked like a champ! I like the fact that it requires no power, just off the battery and it supports a wide range of voltage & current options. Did fantastic with my 8S Traxxas batteries. The only thing I saw that was a possible issue but not a show stopper is the voltage readout had about a .15v variance but this was not a real issue since I was shooting for storage voltage. The display was easy to read, the setup dial felt good and worked well. Cooling worked well. I went through about 26 batteries in 1 day and it worked flawlessly!

Due to how these work, you will get diminishing returns on anything over 2S (7.4V). Mine has performed erratically with 2S packs, sometimes it just turns off. Not happy.

I have always put Lipo my batteries in storage mode, but it always took too long. Using this SKYRC BD200 Battery Discharger & Analyzer I can drain the batteries in a fraction of the time it used to take me.

This works great to show me the poor state of my LiPo packs! Even higher draw rates would be welcome for testing.

Dynamite discharger! So handy to use at field or at home......