Category Archives: Batteries

Looking inside an iPhone 5 battery

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In the wake of my previous teardowns of the iPhone 4 and 4S batteries, I went onto eBay and Amazon (realizing that they finally have Amazon Prime student rates up in Canada) and bought a few iPhone 5 and 5S batteries. Although I was primarily interested in trying to get the gas gauge information out of the batteries, I had a secondary reason. The Nexxtech Slim Power Bank (a subject of a separate blog post) uses a pair of 3.8-volt Li-ion polymer batteries, and they seemed to be be suspiciously similar in size to what is used in the iPhone 5. But enough of that, we’re here for the iPhone 5 battery in particular!

Battery Casing

The iPhone 5 battery measures 3.7 mm in thickness, 3.2 cm in width and 9.1 cm in length. This particular model, made by Sony, has a model ID of US373291H, with the six digits corresponding to the cell’s dimensions. This cell has a labeled capacity of 1440 mAh at a nominal 3.8 volts, with a maximum charge voltage of 4.3 volts. I tried to read the data matrix barcode on the cell but my barcode scanning app on my phone refused to recognize it. I might try to scan and sharpen the barcode later but it’s not something that’s of a high priority to me.

Battery Teardown and Pinout

The board itself is rather interesting. The protection MOSFETs used to switch the battery’s power are chip-scale packages and are glued down with epoxy, same with the gas gauge itself. This means that I can’t easily replace it with a rework station if the need arises. The board includes the gas gauge, thermistors, protection circuitry and still has room for a polyfuse for extra over-current protection.

iPhone 5 battery PCB layout

iPhone 5 battery PCB layout

The pinout of the iPhone 5 battery is pretty much the same as of the iPhone 4 and 4S. You have Pack-, NTC Thermistor, HDQ and Pack+. In this particular model of battery, the gas gauge is a bq27545 (labeled SN27545), but has basically the same feature set as the iPhone 4/4S’ bq27541. With this information, I soldered to the small terminals on the connector (the actual connectors for this battery haven’t arrived yet since it takes so long to receive items from China on eBay), and hooked it up to my trusty Texas Instruments EV2400 box.

iPhone 5 battery pinout

iPhone 5 battery pinout

Battery Data

iphone 5 firmware versionAnd once again, we’re presented with an obscure firmware revision. The latest bq27545-G1 firmware is only version 2.24, but this chip has version 3.10. After forcing GaugeStudio to accept this gauge as a -G1 version, we’re once again presented with a sealed chip. Let’s try to unseal it with the default key…

... aaaaand nope. No dice with 0x36720414, unlike last time.

Nope. No dice with 0x36720414, unlike last time.

… and I get the dreaded “Unseal Key” prompt. Cue the dramatic Darth Vader “NOOOOO” here. Maybe Apple read my previous post and decided to change the default keys this time (Hey Apple, if you read this, make the iPhone 6’s gas gauge have the default keys again)! This means that not only can I not access any of the juicy details of this battery, but I cannot update its firmware to a more… conventional version either. I could try brute-forcing it, but trying to hack a key with a 32-bit address space over a 7 kbps bus… uh, no. That’s not going to happen. I’d probably have better luck reverse-engineering Apple’s battery code but I doubt they have any facility to do in-system firmware updates for the gas gauge.

Data captured from GaugeStudio

Data captured from GaugeStudio

Now for some rather… interesting details of what we can access. The design capacity of this battery, according to the gas gauge, is 1430 mAh, same as the iPhone 4S and also 100 mAh less than what’s written on the label. That, and the full charge capacity of this battery is 1397 mAh out of the gate. The gauge seems to be an insomniac (it won’t enter Sleep mode even when the battery is not hooked up to any load), and it seems to have less features despite having a higher firmware version (I’m sure the internal temperature isn’t 131 degrees C…), and the Pack Configuration register doesn’t bring up any sensible data.

Battery… conspiracy?

One thing that I haven’t confirmed is whether or not this battery had been tampered with before I received it. I bought this particular battery from eBay and it was listed as new. It had some adhesive residue but no obvious sign of being peeled off from another iPhone. The cycle count is set to 1, and because the gas gauge is sealed, I can’t read any other data like the lifetime data logs. There is a chance that this battery isn’t new and that the seller had somehow changed the data memory and sealed the chip with a non-default key, but I need to wait until some other batteries arrive in the mail and perhaps try reading out batteries taken out directly from some iPhone 5s. Until then, it’s only speculation as to why this chip is sealed with a different key.

The next victims specimens: an iPhone 5S battery, a “new” iPhone 4 battery, and an Amazon Kindle battery.

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Review, teardown and analysis of Charging Essentials USB wall outlet

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(UPDATE: March 2, 2015 – I’ve picked up a pair of the newer tamper-resistant versions of this wall outlet. A review and teardown on that unit is coming up; stay tuned!)
(UPDATE 2: May 29, 2016 – Scratch that on the first tamper-resistant model; it had the same performance as the one mentioned here. Also, Costco has released a 3.1A version of this outlet, and is currently under review.)

About a week ago I bought a set of wall outlets from Costco that integrate two USB charging ports into a standard Decora-type receptacle. It’s marketed to replace your traditional AC adapter, allowing other appliances to be plugged in while charging your portable electronics.

The outlet is made by Omee Electrical Company, but curiously enough this particular model, the OM-USBII, wasn’t listed on their site. The packaging itself bears the name Charging Essentials, with a logo that looks like a USB icon that’s had one Viagra too many. The packaging states that the outlet has:

  • “Two 5VDC 2.1A ports for more efficient charging in less time”
  • “Smarter USB charging with special chip designed to recognize and optimize the charging requirements of your device”
  • “Screw-free wall plate snaps into place for a more clean, modern appearance”

The second note is of particular importance to me. If it’s true, that means it might be using some USB charge port controller like TI’s TPS251x-series chips. But I’m not one to have blind faith in what’s written on the packaging. Let’s rip this sucker apart!

The outlet has a snap-on coverplate which may look sleek but could hamper removal of this outlet later on if needed. I was curious as to why one couldn’t just use a regular screw-on coverplate, and it turns out it’s because the mounting flange doesn’t have any tapped screw holes; you physically can’t use screws on this because the manufacturer didn’t want to go to the effort to make holes that can accept screws!

The casing is held together with four triangle-head screws in a weak attempt to prevent opening of the device. I had a security bit set on hand so this posed no hindrance to me. Upon removing the cover, the outlet seems rather well built. However, after removing the main outlet portion to reveal the AC-DC adapter inside, I quickly rescinded that thought.

The converter seems relatively well-built (at least relative to some crap Chinese power supplies out there). Some thought was put into the safe operation of this device, but there’s almost no isolation between the high and low voltage sides, and the DC side of this adapter is not grounded; the “ground” for the USB ports floats at 60 volts AC with respect to the mains earth pin. The Samxon brand caps are also pretty disappointing.

As for the USB portion of this device, I had to remove some hot glue holding the panel in place. After a few minutes of picking away at the rubbery blob, I was able to pull out the USB ports.

… and I found LIES! DIRTY LIES! There is no USB charge port controller, contrary to what the packaging claims. It just uses a set of voltage dividers to emulate the Apple charger standard, which could break compatibility with some smartphones. Ugh, well let’s put it back together and take a look at it from the performance side of things. At least the USB ports feel pretty solid…

To measure the voltage-current characteristic of the outlet, I rebuilt my bq27510-G3 Li-Ion gas gauge board so it had better handling of high current without affecting my current and voltage measurements. The reason I used this is because the gauge combines a voltmeter and ammeter in one chip, and by using the GaugeStudio software, I could create easy, breezy, beautiful V-I graphs.

Using a Re:load 2 constant-current load, I slowly ramped up the load current while logging the voltage and current data to a CSV file for analysis in Excel.

overall vi graphThis charger’s… okay. It has surprisingly good regulation up to 2.3 amps, but after that point the AC-DC converter basically brickwalls and the voltage plummets to 3 volts. That said, this also means that this outlet is not a set of “two 2.1A USB ports”. You can charge one tablet but you won’t be able to charge a tablet along with another device simultaneously.

Bah, I’ve had it with this wall outlet. Looks like this one’s gonna be returned to Costco in the next few days. This outlet may be adequate for some people, but for me it’s a disappointment.

Pros:

  • Solid USB ports
  • Good voltage stability (up to 2.3 amps, enough to charge ONE tablet)
  • Apple device compatibility

Cons:

  • Annoying coverplate design
  • Does not meet rated current output, will not charge 2 tablets or 1 tablet + another device
  • Does NOT have a “smart charging chip” despite being stated on packaging, some devices (eg. BlackBerry) will refuse to charge from these ports
  • Power supply for USB seems cheap
  • USB port is not grounded – if a short-circuit happens inside the power supply it can be a shock hazard to you

A Temporary Hold: Creating Li-Ion battery holders with prototype boards and pin headers

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As seen on Hackaday!

Lithium-ion batteries are great. They have high energy density, are lightweight, and in the case of many portable devices, they can be easily swapped in and out. One problem with prismatic (the types you often find on cell phones that have a set of flat contacts on one end of the battery) packs is that they’re all custom; the cell may be standardized but the pack it’s in is often proprietary to a certain make and model. Sure, there are “universal” holders out there, but they provide poor electrical contact at best. Since I need a secure electrical connection when using my battery fuel gauges, I sought to create a more sturdy holder for the batteries I have lying around.

The construction of the holder is pretty simple. A strip of female pin header (I used a single-pin-width header but a double-width one can be used for greater mechanical strength) is used as an end-stop for the battery, and a right-angle pin header is used to create contact with the battery’s terminals and to provide the physical “clamping” needed to create a good connection. The right-angle header can be bent and soldered into place to adjust the holder to the particular cell you’re using. Additionally, be sure to use some high-quality FR4-based boards as the brown-coloured paper/resin-based boards won’t have as good resilience and strength, and probably won’t be plated through either (this improves the structural integrity of the holder since the pin headers will be under a bit of physical stress).

For connections, I have a 2-pin header (physically a 3-pin header with one removed to denote polarity) and a set of screw terminals. These are wired up using a flat ribbon “wire” used to connect solar cells together as they can handle several amps and come pre-tinned with solder.

This sort of setup can be adapted to nearly any commercially available prismatic battery, provided it uses a flat contact area on the sides.

Tearing down and modifying the Mars RPB60 power bank

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A while ago I mentioned purchasing a very cheap battery pack that obviously didn’t live up to expectations. However, I didn’t get a chance to write about a more capable power bank, the Mars RPB60. It was branded as a SoundLogic/XT power bank, and holds 4400 mAh of battery capacity, with two USB ports (one labeled for 1 amp and 2.1 amps) and a micro-USB power input.

The power bank

The power bank from the outside looks pretty nondescript, with two USB ports, a micro-USB input, a button and four blue LEDs. Initially it seemed that there wouldn’t be any easy way to open up the casing without damaging it, so I tried to pry away the plastic covers at the ends. Doing so revealed plastic plates held in with small Phillips screws. Disassembly from that point was a cinch.

Removing covers reveals hidden screws

Removing covers reveals hidden screws

The PCB portion of the pack is of a stacked design. The two halves are connected with a set of small pin headers, with one side being the main DC-DC converter and USB output, and the other being the “gas gauge” and charging circuitry. The reason I put the phrase ‘gas gauge’ in quotes is that it’s only going by pure voltage thresholds, making it inaccurate when under load (like charging a phone and tablet, for example).

2014-01-05 00.25.02The main microcontroller is an unmarked 14-pin SOIC (likely an OTP-based PIC clone) and a TP4056 Li-Ion charging IC. The DC-DC converter is a DFN package that I couldn’t find any data on, but from what I can tell it integrates the DC-DC converter control circuitry and the switching MOSFETs.

2014-01-05 00.26.41

Blurry photo of microcontroller/charger PCB, taken with a potato for a camera. 😛

2014-01-05 00.27.16 Cells

The cells themselves seemed to be of good quality, but the bastards at Mars decided to black out the branding and model number of the cells! However, I was unphased at their attempt to cover up what cells they were using. With a careful cleaning with flux remover and some Kimwipes, I found that this pack uses ATL INR18650 cells with a DW01-based protection circuit. These cells hold 2200 mAh each, and the INR prefix means that these are high-power cells intended to provide heavy output currents. This is desirable as a 10 watt load like an iPad would definitely put heavy strain on the batteries. Considering the good cells they used, I don’t understand why they’d want to hide the markings on the cells (and in a half-assed way too!)…

The initial capacity was at about 4800 mAh (greater than the rated capacity 😀 ) with an average ESR of about 63 milliOhms. However, after a dozen charge-discharge cycles, the capacity has decreased to 4630 mAh and has an average internal resistance of 190 milliOhms. I’ve got a feeling charge cycle endurance may be an issue with this battery pack. Time will tell…

Gas gauge hacking

Since this battery pack didn’t have the gas gauge capabilities I wanted (voltage threshold-based gauging isn’t enough!), I decided to put in my own. I built a small bq27541-V200 gauge board with an external thermistor and current-sense resistor, using the breakout board itself to hold all the SMD passive components required for the gauge to function. The thermistor is taped to the cells to get an accurate temperature reading, and the current-sense resistor is attached in series between the cell’s negative terminal and the negative contact of the protection circuit.

Gas gauge chip added

Gas gauge chip added

This is where the hacking happens. I connected the I2C lines to the left USB port’s data lines. The voltage divider used for Apple devices is very high-resistance and makes for good I2C pullup resistors. The device still appears as a normal device charger but works just fine when the I2C signals are hidden behind the USB lines.

Quirks

However, the design for my gauge is definitely not the best one. I noticed that with heavy use (and not even one full discharge cycle), the gauge had reset 4 times without me knowing. Of course, I’m not expecting great performance from this gauge since it’s extremely susceptible to EMI (long wires looping around are just asking for trouble 🙂 ) in its current state. Given how I basically hacked this together in a matter of a few hours, it works well enough. Next up is to go into Altium Designer and make a proper gas gauge board with good EMI and RFI mitigation (and perhaps sell them on Tindie; the hobbyist community needs better gas gauges and stop being so paranoid about Li-Ion batteries).

Further testing showed that certain phones put pulses on the USB lines which has occasionally caused the bq27541 to crash and reset as well.

Additionally, I’ve noticed that the DC-DC converter circuit is quite inefficient. It has 5-7 mA of quiescent current draw and has about 60-80% efficiency. At a full charge, it will take only one month before all the charge is drained from the cells and the protection circuit disconnects the cells.

Future plans

Since this battery pack has a nicely built casing, I intend to gut the battery pack, design new PCBs inside with good DC-DC conversion, an Impedance Track-based fuel gauge, and an onboard microcontroller with some battery-logging capabilities (perhaps to an EEPROM or an SPI Flash ROM), accessible through the micro-USB port. I also plan to use some higher-capacity cells, like the 3400 mAh Panasonic NCR18650B.

If not, then at least I want to replace the microcontroller with one that will read the bq27541’s state of charge readings and display them on the LED bar graph.

Looking inside an iPhone 4/4S battery

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A classmate of mine had a couple broken iPhones that he ‘relieved’ of their batteries and let me take a look at them. Being the curious type I peeled away the outer layers of tape to reveal the protection circuit. I spotted a current sense resistor, and  that got me thinking…

… can it be? Yes, I found a bq27541 fuel gauge chip inside the battery! After fooling around with the battery, I found out that the battery is using the HDQ interface.

iphone battery pinoutThe HDQ bus, which stands for ‘High-speed Data Queue’, is a single-wire communications bus used by TI fuel gauges. It’s similar to Maxim’s 1-Wire protocol but runs with different protocols and timing. It operates at 7 kilobits per second (so much for ‘high speed’ right? 😛 ) and a refresh of the data memory in the TI software can take almost half a minute. However, it’s good enough for occasional polling (like every minute or so) since it’s unlikely that the gauge will be read from every second.

The bq27541(labeled BQ 7541) in the iPhone battery runs an unusual firmware version. It’s running version 1.35 and doesn’t match with any release on TI’s website. The gas gauge is sealed so initially it seems like gaining access to the Data Flash memory would be impossible. However, in non-Apple fashion, the gauge’s passwords are left at the default; 0x36720414 and 0xFFFFFFFF for the unseal and full-access keys, respectively (and it’s not the first time Apple’s done this!). Since the firmware version is unknown, I told bqEVSW to treat the chip as if it were the bq27541-V200. I then saved only the calibration, capacity, resistance and lifetime data.

Updating the firmware over HDQ was a nightmare. It took over a dozen tries for each of the two batteries I had, and the update process took 45 minutes (!) to update the bq27541 to the V200 firmware. At one point, it seemed as if I bricked the chip, but a power-on reset of the chip by shorting the cell very quickly 😀 sent the device into ROM mode (ie. firmware-update mode). From there I used bqCONFIG to update the firmware, and it was successful! Now I could use GaugeStudio to interface with the gauge rather than the unsightly bqEVSW software.

bq27541 updated to version 2.00

bq27541 updated to version 2.00

Given how long it took for me to update the firmware of the gauge, I have doubts that iPhones will update their batteries’ firmware in-system. Hell, the iPhone OS ignores the bq27541’s State of Charge readings and substitutes its own. Nice going, Apple!

Now to start going through cell phone recycling bins to pull out dead iPhone batteries for their gauges…

Mini-Ramble: I’m one of TI’s Community Members of the Month!

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Yesterday I received a nice little email from The Texas Instruments E2E Community team. I was chosen as their Member of the Month of their analog electronics forum, specifically the battery fuel gauge section (of course!).

CaptureTI is sending me a Fuel Tank BoosterPack for their Launchpad microcontroller development platforms. It includes a 1200 mAh lithium-polymer battery, a bq27510 fuel gauge, and a bq24210 lithium-ion charger, all on one board. They’ve also offered me the opportunity to write a post on their power management blog, Fully Charged, regarding this little board. When I receive it I’ll definitely be taking a closer look at it.

Thanks, Texas Instruments!

Tearing down and analyzing a cheap-ass “Xtreme” $3.50 external phone battery

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I was shopping around at this electronics liquidation store and stumbled upon a couple cheap buys: A “1900 mAh” external phone battery and another 4400 mAh pack (which will be the subject of another post and teardown). The batteries were originally priced at $7 and $38 respectively, but they were on sale at half price. For $3.50, I was curious enough about the 1900 mAh battery’s real capacity that I bought it anyway, expecting to be disappointed.

The pack itself is roughly half the size of a typical smartphone and about 1.5 times thicker. The casing itself has no screws; the manufacturer decided it was too expensive to use screws so they simply ultrasonic-welded the case shut. After about half an hour with a plastic spudger tool, I was able to crack the case open.

2014-01-05 00.11.26The soldering quality, surprisingly, is pretty good for a sub-$10 device, save for a bunch of hand-soldered components with flux residue left behind. The circuit board is made up of a battery protection circuit (yes, they actually put one in!), an ME2108A-50 boost converter,  something I’d assume to be a charging circuit, and an LM324 op-amp as a “gas gauge” (if you could even call it that!).

2014-01-05 00.11.36The cell appears to be a thicker version of a typical cell phone battery. It’s similar in size to something like a Nokia BL-5C which is a 1020 mAh cell, and is 5.6 mm thick. The cell in the charger is 7.7 mm thick. The charger’s cell is only 37.5% thicker but should have 190% of the capacity… yeah, no. This is not going to be very promising, given how the spot-welded nickel strips literally fell off the cell when I tried to desolder it from the PCB.

After soldering some 20-gauge solid wire to the terminals and hooking it up to a bq27425-G2A fuel gauge chip, I noticed that it reported that the fully-charged voltage is 4.25 volts. This charger tries to squeeze the most out of the cell by overcharging it! Granted, a Li-Ion cell’s maximum terminal voltage is 4.25 volts but it shouldn’t settle down to this voltage after charging!

1900 mah charger overvoltageAfter performing a few learning cycles to determine capacity and resistance, the cell holds merely 1370 mAh. The internal resistance is about 85 milliohms, which tells me that at least they used a relatively fresh cell in this charger and not just some recycled cell (*cough* UltraFire *cough*).

1900 mah charger graphI knew from the get-go that this battery was going to be a let-down, and I was right. But hey, for $3.50 I get a half-decent 1370 mAh cell and a few scrap chips (no way I’m reusing that battery’s PCB as-is!). But my verdict: Avoid this battery pack if you intend to use it to, I dunno, charge your phone. 😛

Skin-Deep Authenticity: Tearing down a “genuine fake” Samsung Galaxy S II battery

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When you have the same smartphone for almost 3 years, it’s likely that your original battery’s not going to last as long as the service contract. And as long as you’re not an iPhone user you will probably look into a replacement or spare battery.

coverMy first replacement cell was a 2-pack of “1800 mAh” batteries for $5. These had 66% of the stated capacity and TI’s Impedance Track gauge said that the DC internal resistance was about 250 milliOhms. That’s… pretty terrible. Those two cells quickly led their end in a battery recycling bin. My next two were “genuine” cells from eBay. They cost about $12 each and had rather authentic-looking labels on them too. Their performance was pretty good, but one of them became all bloated so I decided I’d take a look at the cell that’s inside. I peeled off the label, and the truth comes out…

2014-01-01 04.53.39This battery was an outright lie in terms of capacity! 1350 mAh is about 80% of the 1650 mAh capacity that was written on the outer label. The cell’s manufacturer is unknown, but the battery markings read “BMW-524655AR 1350mAh 2012.09.03.1110”. Wait, look at that manufacturer date. Something’s fishy…

2014-01-01 04.53.54The outer label states a manufacture date of July 20, 2012. The internal cell states one of September 3, 2012. Unless this battery was manufactured in a time-bending factory, then these batteries certainly aren’t genuine.

Next up was the protection circuit. The “genuine fake” battery uses a DW01 protection IC and uses a generic 8205A dual NFET for swiching. And there wasn’t even a thermistor; the PCB uses a 1.5k ohm resistor to simulate one. A genuine board uses a single SMD package that integrates the FETs and the protection IC.

Below is a comparison of the protection board of a fake battery and a “genuine fake” one. At least the “genuine fake” uses the same black appearance of the original.

The “genuine fake” battery, after only 2 months of usage (not even 20 charge cycles’ worth), became so swollen that I can’t keep the back cover on. Running this battery through a bq27425-G2A battery gas gauge determined that the real capacity of the battery is a paltry 944 mAh, with an average internal resistance of 187 milliOhms. Absolutely pathetic.

samsung galaxy s ii replacement battery old ra graphGoes to show you get what you pay for. But some things may be more deceiving than others…

Using a laptop battery to power lighter-socket devices

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Laptop batteries can be a rather handy source of power, even if it’s not being used in a laptop computer. I built an adapter that converts the knife-blade connector that a laptop battery uses to a car lighter socket.

2013-12-24 02.02.02The connections are made by taking the blades of an ATO or ATC (regular size) car fuse, soldering them to some 16-gauge speaker wire, then soldering the other end to an inexpensive DC lighter socket.

2013-12-24 02.05.39This setup is only good for roughly 5 amps (the overcurrent protection on this battery is set to 6 amps) and the voltage near the end of discharge can be too low for certain devices; power inverters will stop at about 10 to 11 volts which leaves a small amount of battery capacity unused.

Reverse-engineering the Toshiba Tecra R840’s battery interface… the long way

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Since the summer I’ve been all about interfacing with smart batteries. All the laptops I’ve had, I’ve deciphered the pinouts for. However, our college-supplied laptops, the Toshiba Tecra R840, has eluded me for over a year. The IT department didn’t allow me to obtain an old battery pack for disassembly (not like I was expecting them to 🙂 ), so instead I looked at disassembling the laptop to find out the interface. The reason I decided to take apart the laptop as opposed to the battery, is that the laptop is generally able to be taken apart and re-assembled without leaving permanent marks; batteries are often ultrasonically welded and can only be opened with brute force or a hot knife.

Laptop bottom cover removed and powered by battery

Laptop bottom cover removed and powered by battery

After removing many screws and popping the bottom of the laptop apart, I looked to the battery connector to find out the pinout.

Close-up of battery connector

Close-up of battery connector

The PCB had an unpopulated spot for some 3-terminal ESD protection diode, and this was a hint that these two pins were what I was looking for. I soldered some wires to the pins and a third ground wire, and attached them to a pin header. I used a logic analyzer to examine the signals (if any) that passed through the connector.

toshiba battery

Logic analyzer trace of initial battery insertion

And I hit pay dirt, or so I thought. I was able to find out that there indeed was communication between the battery and the laptop. However, the fun ends there. Looking closely at the I2C transactions, I could see that the battery wasn’t speaking the normal SBS (Smart Battery System) protocol. Testing with my Texas Instruments EV2400 confirmed that this isn’t a smart battery. It appears that the battery likely only contains an EEPROM for some battery information storage but lacks any real means of gas gauging. That would probably explain why battery life is abysmal on these machines!

Toshiba battery not detected with smart battery hardware/software

Toshiba battery not detected with smart battery hardware/software

I was able to mostly figure out the pinout for the battery, but what has yet to be seen, is which pins provide power to the EEPROM chip, as it seems that it is not powered internally.

Currently known battery pinout

Currently known battery pinout

Sometime later I’ll have to delve further into the contents of the EEPROM, or try and obtain one of these batteries for disassembly. We’ll just have to see.

Ramble: 1.5-volt lithium polymer AA battery? What sorcery is this?

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Been a while since I’ve posted anything on here, but I decided to share my thoughts on a peculiar AA battery.

This AA battery is the Kentli lithium-polymer AA cell. It has a built-in 1.5 volt regulator that converts the typical 3.7 volts down to 1.5 volts (open-circuit at least). I bought a 4-pack of these cells from AliExpress back in October, but have yet to receive them. Even though I haven’t gotten them, there is some things that I’ve taken note of.

Current/voltage output

A graph promoting the battery discharge curve of the Kentli cell is shown below, taken from a sales page on AliExpress (rehosted on this blog to prevent image bandwidth-hogging):

705255222_102The interesting thing I found out was the green dashed line. This is supposed to represent the output voltage when used in a wireless microphone. However, the graph itself provides no meaningful data because no current loads are specified at all. In an attempt to get some sort of information from the graph, a Google search for a spec sheet for a typical microphone gives a discharge current of 125 mA. But a 0.3 volt drop at 125 mA? I dunno, this doesn’t seem right.

Safety

From a safety point of view, I’m not sure about how much temperature would rise in the cell from high current draw and whether overheating could occur in use, and if any typical Li-Ion protection circuitry is used (voltage and discharge protection). Given how this is made by some relatively unknown Chinese company, who knows.

I’m not saying anything definite until I see these cells and have a chance to get my paws on them for testing and disassembly. Until then, we’ll just have to wait.

Ramble: Consumer external batteries that have firmware updates and SCADA? I don’t get it!

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I’m looking at  XPAL Power’s website, where they advertise that their batteries can:

  • check battery manufacture date
  • remotely report charge cycle count, and remaining cycle count before wear-out
  • perform a battery calibration via a charge-discharge cycle
  • remotely monitor and report battery temperature
  • perform battery firmware resets and updates

Some of these features are definitely feasible, some others… well, I have a very hard time trying to believe some of these.

  • Manufacture date check: Definitely doable. Any decent manufacturer would keep records of serial numbers and correlate it to manufacture date, lot codes and so on.
  • Remote cycle count and SoH (state of health) reporting: I honestly cannot see how this would be feasible without either a USB cable or some other means of data transfer. Bluetooth may be an option but that brings issues of its own (you’d need a BT transceiver in the battery, which I strongly doubt exists in a consumer external battery). However, the idea of cycle count and health monitoring isn’t anything unusual; as mentioned in previous posts, modern gas gauges are definitely capable of counting charge cycles and other battery health parameters.
  • Battery calibration: If the battery has a (at least moderately) smart gas gauge IC, then this would be done for calibration anyway; nothing novel here.
  • Remote temperature monitoring and reporting: This would fall under my statement about SoH reporting and so on. Additionally, the whole idea of continuous reporting of temperature to the user (and the manufacturer) would require some sort of network connection, whether it be wireless or wired. Either way, this would mean that a prohibitively expensive solution would be needed to implement what is essentially SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition)… in an external battery used to charge a phone, tablet or laptop. But, if this feature is used then I guess there could be a way to use the device’s network connection (maybe USB-to-serial or something) to communicate with the manufacturer to transfer data. Once again, this would bring problems with device compatibility, and I strongly doubt that a USB charger would implement a microcontroller system that has enough oomph to implement USB host functionality just to send battery data.
  • Remote firmware control:  I don’t see how this would be implemented outside a laptop battery that uses the Smart Battery System to communicate. Even if a battery had a microcontroller (most out there would have basic protection, charging and DC-DC conversion), I doubt that a means of programming would be exposed to an external data port. What if  a communication problem caused the firmware update to abort prematurely?

I don’t mean to bash XPAL or anything (I have many of their products and their batteries have outlasted any other Li-Ion based devices I have had) but I’m just not sold on how they can implement remote reporting and firmware updates  for their batteries, given the amount of processing required host- and battery-side to implement these functions. Even if it was a fully remote and wireless solution, then it’d require RF interfacing which would cost far too much to implement in a way that would require nearly zero user intervention.

That said, I myself have plans to implement something like this (a battery with a BT interface) but it definitely isn’t something that would be feasible for the mass market. That will be revealed in a later post, but in the meantime I’m mourning the loss of a very nice 4-cell battery that I built that used my bq27421 chip to do charge gauging.

Convenient chips, inconvenient packages: Making use of the Texas Instruments bq27421-G1 lithium-ion battery fuel gauge chip

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As seen on Hackaday!

I ordered some sample chips from TI a few weeks ago, most of them being lithium-ion battery “fuel gauge” chips. These chips are used in electronic devices to determine exactly how much energy is in the battery, and if the chip’s sophisticated enough, provide a “time until empty” prediction.

The bq27421 from TI is packaged in a tiny 9-ball grid array, packaged as a wafer-level chip scale package (WLCSP). This means there is no epoxy covering like normal ICs, making for a compact design that’s a good thing for space-constrained applications like modern cell phones. I’ll talk about this chip later on in this post.

The tiny BGA package means that prototyping with these chips is difficult if not impossible, depending on how large the chip is that you’re working with. The bq27421 is about 1.6 mm x 1.6 mm, which is less than 1/3 of the size of a grain of rice. No way you’d be able to put that on a breadboard… right?

2013-06-14 15.51.58Well, you can, with a small breakout board, some magnet wire, epoxy (a bigger deal than you might initially think), patience and steady hands. I mounted the chips in what I call a mix between dead-bug (where the contacts face up as if the chip was like a dead bug on the ground) and chip-on-board construction (where the chip is glued directly to a board, wire-bonded and then covered in epoxy). I used some SOIC-to-DIP boards from DipMicro Electronics (link). I often use these boards when doing work on prototyping board since using these surface-mount parts reduce the board’s height compared to using actual DIP packaged chips (which are much less common for modern ICs anyway).

The chip is first affixed to the breakout board using a small amount of epoxy and allowed to cure for several hours. The epoxy, from what I’ve found, is crucial to your success; superglue and other adhesives won’t stand up to the heat of a soldering iron, and if it loosens you can end up ruining your chip and wasting your time spent working on it.

After letting the epoxy cure, I then prepare the bond pads around the chip. I place a liberal amount of solder on each pad to allow easy connection with the iron later; I want to minimize the stress on the tiny 40-gauge magnet wire because once the connection is made, the solder ball that the chip came with won’t be as easy to solder to the second time around.

Next up is the actual soldering process. I created a pinout for the board in PowerPoint to help plan out how I’ll solder the wires. After tinning a long length of 40-gauge magnet wire, I then solder the wire first to the solder ball on the chip, then solder the other end to the pad I previously put solder on. To minimize the stress on the wire afterwards, I use a small utility knife to cut the end of the wire where the pad is. I then complete this for the rest of the contacts. This took me an hour and a half the first try, but took me about 20 minutes the second time around. Also, for my second try, for the BAT and SRX pins, which carry the full current for any loads connected, I used 30-gauge wire-wrapping wire to allow a bit more current-carrying capacity. It probably is overkill since the maximum current rating for the bq27421 is 2 amps continuous, but I felt a bit more at ease connecting the pins this way.

After checking for short and open circuits with a multimeter I then placed headers onto the board and put it into my “evaluation board” that I created just for this chip. Using an EV2400 box from TI, used to connect to their vast range of battery-management chips, I connect the box to my PC and run their GaugeStudio software to verify that the chip works.

… and it does, like a charm! I was able to communicate with the chip and also view its operation in real-time.

One thing that was causing me trouble before was that after removing the battery and putting another one in, I found that the gauge chip sometimes wouldn’t be recognized by the PC. Being unsure why it was doing this, I dug through the reference manual, and found one tiny part in the manual that showed me why it wasn’t working consistently.

gpoutThe GPOUT pin was left floating on my board, and the chip requires a logic high signal before it starts up. This brings back memories of my digital electronics class in college; these floating inputs can cause all sorts of trouble if you’re not careful, and in this case, it was mentioned only once in the reference manual. After using a 1 megohm resistor to pull up the pin, the chip worked flawlessly. Now that I verified that the chip was working, I mixed up some more epoxy and covered the chip, making sure that the bond wires and chip were covered to prevent damage.

After all that, I had a couple working highly-advanced battery gauges that I could fool around with, and also learned a couple things about deadbugging SMT components and also the basics of chip-on-board construction.