Checking interest before FS: Handmade ThinkPad T/X6x battery repair kit

[kfzhu1229]

After making a post about rebuilding ThinkPad X6x 22/22++ batteries, I realise there are still some hurtles for people without experience on this matter to overcome.
With the resources from Shenzhen huaqiangbei electronics market/HQ-mart, I was able to come up with ideas to easier facilitate such operations for me.
Before I do anything, I want to see, how many of you would be interested in my following ideas for easy to use handmade adaptor kits over the coming days. See if there is demand for me commit up to 20 of them, will be shipped from Canada and my estimate would be about C$25 per kit. Shipping via Canada Post small packets air is about $10-15 Canadian dollars internationally
The kit works with Lenovo era ThinkPad like T/X6x T4x0/T/W5x0 X2xx/X3xx etc, and will consist of:
- a CP2112 programmer. For your convenience, the suspect capacitor that enables firmware update will be removed to lock the programmer's firmware in place, and only the 3 headers you will ever need (GND, SCL, SDA) will be soldered
- A custom-made adaptor consisting of the following soldered together:
a. A 2mm to 2.54mm hole spacing converter board. 2mm is for the battery connector and 2.54mm is the standard for common jumper wires. Holds the connections nice and sturdy, eliminating the risk of bricking your BMS by writing corrupted data
b. 7 pin ThinkPad battery connector with the notch in the middle, commonly used on T/X6x and a whole slew of later models
c. the 3 headers soldered at where the GND, SCL, SDA pins will always be, facilitating easy connection and eliminating the chances of burning the programmer by mistakenly connecting to P+ of the battery pack. P+ header will be provided for the ease of jumpstarting the battery, differentiated by the use of right angle headers vs straight headers
- female to female jumper wires, and a male to female jumper wire to jumpstart BQ8030 equipped batteries
- Possibly (if permitted by the rules) a CD-R disc consisting of some of the stuff I'd commonly use for this job for your convenience
Illustration of the setup will be in the Onedrive gallery: https://1drv.ms/f/c/5c2e4f27557c0be2/Eg ... A?e=q4QpwR
The point is to provide an all-in-one solution to make the unlocking of old ThinkPad batteries easier and more foolproof. But if you are to rebuild the battery pack, understand the safety implications with that first, and then practice on smaller packs and make sure you're actually familiar with this job before you press ahead with these! I will take NO responsibility about what you will be doing right or wrong!
If you want to wire this up on your own, feel free to ask any questions about this setup.
Let me know in the comments if you'd be interested in stuff like this.

EDIT: It seems like I may have misworded the title slightly. This kit is to help you reprogram/repair the BMS of your battery, rather than doing any magic with the battery cells. If those are tired/dead, they have to be replaced.
Also, with different handmade adaptors, this could easily translate to T4x era ThinkPads, but BQ8011 will be a lot more of a headache to reprogram AFAIK. I also have made other adaptors to work with Acer (7 or 8 pin) and HP batteries (6 or 8 pin). Dell batteries would be a bit more of a headache to reprogram.

[TPFanatic]

I'm not handsy enough to do such a job, so as Mr. Wonderful would say, I'm out.

You may have the foundation of a small or large business venture. If you can get enough handy people and a legal staff to fight back against dubious consumer complaints and to navigate the labyrinth of legally shipping batteries, you could take a limited or unlimited orders for battery refurbishment which ThinkPad fans across the globe may appreciate substantially, and/or keep it local / continental. Unlike what's churned out of the factories abroad, your customers should appreciate paying for a higher quality product, see Breaking Bad.

Respectfully,

TPFanatic

[Medessec]

I'd absolutely be interested in a kit! And I know quite a few who would also appreciate such a kit, I'll see if I can get some better idea of the interest or have them let you know on here if they have accounts.

Battery rebuilding would be a fantastic means to help out those persisting with these older units, and also having more control about what sort of cells you use in the pack itself, which I know is something that makes us a bit weary about third-party repro batteries.

[kfzhu1229]

I'd absolutely be interested in a kit! And I know quite a few who would also appreciate such a kit, I'll see if I can get some better idea of the interest or have them let you know on here if they have accounts.

Battery rebuilding would be a fantastic means to help out those persisting with these older units, and also having more control about what sort of cells you use in the pack itself, which I know is something that makes us a bit weary about third-party repro batteries.

Sounds good. I dug through a lot of this knowledge on my own and across Chinese and English based forums, and the ease of access to Shenzhen's electronic market made ordering parts to test around nice and easy. Without browsing their markets in person, I would've not known about the existence of those 2mm to 2.54mm premade PCB's that makes plugging the battery into the CP2112 programmer as easy as plugging in an USB device!
I will also shortly put a number of X60 and X61s for sale with these shiny rebuilt batteries as well as the packs themselves, featuring either the Samsung INR18650-35E or the Sanyo 18650GA flagship cells, which as you can imagine, will not come cheaply, rather than me being greedy and charging scalping prices.
I rather not put my own knowledge behind a paywall, but I'd like hobbists to know exactly what I did, so that ONLY IF you are able to do it SAFELY, you're free to learn and try what I did with all this stuff.
And then if one knows clearly that one don't have such ability for such operations, then I can offer those ready to go X61 battery packs that are almost guaranteed to outlast the lifespan of the laptop, and then you'll know full well exactly what you'll be getting.
If anyone is to buy my kits, I will need to almost burn to the back of their minds about the safety implications. I DON'T want anyone to use my kits irresponsibly. When it comes to fixing electronics, knowing exactly where your limitations are is a pretty important skill. I am here to help fellow hobbyists, not trying to light other ppl's houses on fire!

[kfzhu1229]

You may have the foundation of a small or large business venture. If you can get enough handy people and a legal staff to fight back against dubious consumer complaints and to navigate the labyrinth of legally shipping batteries, you could take a limited or unlimited orders for battery refurbishment which ThinkPad fans across the globe may appreciate substantially, and/or keep it local / continental. Unlike what's churned out of the factories abroad, your customers should appreciate paying for a higher quality product, see Breaking Bad.

That part could be a headache, especially since so many things can go very wrong when it comes to rebuilding these batteries. Some people can't even use AA's correctly, and these li-ion battery cells are far from as easy to tame as inserting a bunch of AA's. It takes a lot of safety precautions for you to build a battery pack that is reliable and safe enough for you to plug it in and forget about it
Shipping batteries themselves is gonna be too tricky for me to deal with, and my rebuilt packs themselves will probably only be available locally in Toronto area, or at most within Canada.
But the laptops I'm selling to the whole of North America could come with these one-of-a-kind rebuilt battery packs, even my ThinkPad R40 with a Pentium 4-M CPU can now be enjoyed on battery power
I try to keep the number of these things I deal with under control, as to do these rebuilds to the highest standards, it is a very time consuming task. Speeding that up means potentially cutting corners to safety.
With Shenzhen resources, I can do not just standard 18650's, but I can now also do tricky to find Tablet series batteries with 103450 prismatic cells, as I'm also getting a batch of Panasonic NCA103450 cells. My ThinkPad X201T is now using those cells and it works great! I have dealt with that battery seller multiple times in person at the Shenzhen SEG Market, and now I'm trying to get him to send bulks of these halfway across the globe. If this works out, he might be your source of buying bulk Samsung INR18650-35E's or Panasonic NCA103450's, or even other treats like genuine Panasonic ML1220, CR2016/25/32's with side wraps and legs spot welded on, or even Varta replacements!

[TPFanatic]

Mate, you're incredible.

[Plunkyy]

Really amazing stuff! Personally I don't trust myself to rebuild batteries but I'm sure many others here would be interested. I actually had both an X60 8-cell and a T60 9-cell re-celled a few months ago by chansbattery here in Canada. They re-built my X60 one to just under 75whr capacity and I want to ask if there is room for improvement here? I don't know much about batteries but is the capacity bottlenecked by the availability of high-capacity cells or the BMS or maybe both? 9-cell X200/X201 batteries have a capacity of 94whr which is why I'm even asking, because to me it seems like 80+whr is possible but I may just be naive.

[axur-delmeria]

This looks awesome. I'm a bit interested, but I need a spot welded if I'm gonna rebuild my own battery packs.

[kfzhu1229]

Really amazing stuff! Personally I don't trust myself to rebuild batteries but I'm sure many others here would be interested. I actually had both an X60 8-cell and a T60 9-cell re-celled a few months ago by chansbattery here in Canada. They re-built my X60 one to just under 75whr capacity and I want to ask if there is room for improvement here? I don't know much about batteries but is the capacity bottlenecked by the availability of high-capacity cells or the BMS or maybe both? 9-cell X200/X201 batteries have a capacity of 94whr which is why I'm even asking, because to me it seems like 80+whr is possible but I may just be naive.

I also have a rebuilt original ThinkPad 22 and 22++ battery (but built by myself obviously). One has Samsung INR18650-35E and the other have Sanyo 18650GA, both of which are state of the art 3500mah battery cells. Both usable capacities come just under their designed capacities. This has to do with these old BQ8030 firmware setting the discharge cutoff voltage too high. Recharge cutoff voltage is the same at 4.2V/16.8V, but while these modern INR Nickel based lithiums should have discharge cut off at 2.5V/10V (meaning that's the 0% point where your laptop should be cut power), The old BQ8030 firmware does it at as high as 3.35V/13.4V! This means the batteries are only ~75% discharged by the time your BMS cut power. To the best of my knowledge, no one has figured out how to change those parameters on a BQ8030 without bricking the BMS - because no one figured out how to compute the checksum that protects the static area of the EEPROM (including device name, design capacity, charging voltage, etc)
Also, one other thing I found with most BMS, is that they're only happy with a full charge capacity <= 110% of design capacity, and design capacity cannot be changed on the BQ8030 for the same reason as above.
I really do wonder for my own knowledge, any idea how much you paid for and what tier of battery cells you got?

[kfzhu1229]

This looks awesome. I'm a bit interested, but I need a spot welded if I'm gonna rebuild my own battery packs.

I bought a SWM-10 portable spot welder from that battery seller in Shenzhen. It was significantly cheaper than the same unit on aliexpress, which is not a surprise. But most importantly, the unit was portable for me to bring to an aircraft just like a power bank, and the welding power out of that thing was more than plenty for laptop battery packs that doesn't need 20A loads or something.

[axur-delmeria]

I bought a SWM-10 portable spot welder from that battery seller in Shenzhen.

A quick search led me to this Aliexpress listing, with the shipping fee being twice the item's price.

[Plunkyy]

I really do wonder for my own knowledge, any idea how much you paid for and what tier of battery cells you got?

$59 CAD for the 8-cell X61 battery and $39 CAD for another 4-cell X61 battery that I sold to a friend. No tax, just e-transfer + shipping both ways. I've got no clue what kind of cells she rebuilt my batteries with, but they seem solid. My 8-cell is at 93% total capacity only because I was using it plugged in and docked for maybe a week or so without battery thresholds (I'm dumb). Since then, the max capacity has remained steady.

Thanks for the explanation on the BMS stuff, would be neat if anyone ever figured out how to compute that checksum, though I'm sure at this point many have already tried. It would be nice to squeeze every ounce of battery life out of these old ultra portables.

[kfzhu1229]

A quick search led me to this Aliexpress listing, with the shipping fee being twice the item's price.

Oof yeah aliexpress shipping sometimes is weird... And since that thing has a pretty big battery inside to carry some of the load of the spot welder, shipping can be a bit of a pain. I suppose I will see first if that battery seller can fulfill my order to Canada, if he can do that then I imagine buying from Shenzhen directly is infact an option if you need to order so many battery cells anyway.

$59 CAD for the 8-cell X61 battery and $39 CAD for another 4-cell X61 battery that I sold to a friend. No tax, just e-transfer + shipping both ways. I've got no clue what kind of cells she rebuilt my batteries with, but they seem solid. My 8-cell is at 93% total capacity only because I was using it plugged in and docked for maybe a week or so without battery thresholds (I'm dumb). Since then, the max capacity has remained steady.

I suppose that's pretty reasonable pricing considering the labour costs involved with this (for me each would take hours of delicate handwork to ensure that they're safe in harsh environments). The 18650-35E I did in Shenzhen is about 4 Canadian dollars each (about 5 for my upcoming order of these cells after shipping), the Sanyos significantly cheaper since I got them used. And yeah, with my FSB overclocked X61s, these batteries really come in handy since these high quality cells sustain large power draws much better
Ever since this, I'm now slowly getting rid of the dozen batteries I purchased from Battdepot which turned out to be pretty terrible in quality, with bottom tier 2000mah cells that can't even outlast 20 year old Samsung Sony or Panasonic cells.

[wujstefan]

I'd like one too.
I have been selling out my TP collection, but R601 stays, and it's not getting any newer

[755cdxd]

Sounds promising!
Question: how exactly your "software" involved in process? Do we need it to hack controller firmware or to actually flash it back to a controller? Asking because I assume software you are talking about is written for windows and it might be tricky to make it work with IO-interfaces under Wine.

[755cdxd]

Sounds promising!
Question: how exactly your "software" involved in process? Do we need it to hack controller firmware or to actually flash it back to a controller? Asking because I assume software you are talking about is written for windows and it might be tricky to make it work with IO-interfaces under Wine.

[kfzhu1229]

Sounds promising!
Question: how exactly your "software" involved in process? Do we need it to hack controller firmware or to actually flash it back to a controller? Asking because I assume software you are talking about is written for windows and it might be tricky to make it work with IO-interfaces under Wine.

The easiest to use software of mine being BE2Works is closed source, but works more or less the same way as open source stuff like the DJI Battery Killer or the SmartBatteryHack (meant for Arduino). You can read about the SMBus communication there.
Alternatively, you can also use Linux and directly send SMBus commands to do what you want it to do.
For BQ8030 (found on most Sanyo based Lenovo battery packs from x6x series to xx20 series), basically someone found out how to get the chip to enter boot mode (akin to download mode on Androids), so that you can read and write its EEPROM
Same thing goes for BQ80201 (Sony)
For BQ208x, BQ20Zxx, BQ30xx, there are public documentations available on how to communicate with the battery, but it typically requires an unseal key that may or may not be default. If it is not default, you're gonna need either proper remote authentication process like on NLBA programmer, or rely on Russians to have figured out how to crack the password (BE2Works). Once unsealed, then it's easy to change cycle count, capacity (0x17 and 0x18) as well as removing permanent failure flag (write default unseal pass words to 0x00)
This kit is NOT terribly useful for T4x batteries or earlier, only useful for diagnostics such as individual cell voltage readouts. The BQ8011 (Sanyo) or BQ8012 (Sony) have no ability to acknowledge basic SMBus writes or to let you read/write the whole EEPROM. For those unfortunately you have to desolder the EEPROM chip entirely and remove the lock flag there.

[kfzhu1229]

I think here's what I'm gonna do. I am gonna order enough stuff for about 10-12 of these. They will arrive in early March, by then I will put these up for sale officially.
Meanwhile I will come up with a set of stuff to put onto a CD-R disc that I can include with these to easily facilitate your ease of using this.
My recommendation is if you're gonna unlock just one or two Sanyo packs, you can use the DJI Battery Killer. If you're gonna do these over and over, then I recommend you dedicate a laptop with Windows XP and without internet connectivity, and then load BE2Works on there instead, it's much more streamlined to control
One more thing I shall consider with that project is, is it a good idea if there is some sort of place online where we gather all the EEPROM dumps of these batteries, kinda like a BIOS dump, and then put a locked one vs one that's unlocked (permanent fail flag removed), so that ppl have somewhere to resort to if say you bricked your BMS

[755cdxd]

One more thing I shall consider with that project is, is it a good idea if there is some sort of place online where we gather all the EEPROM dumps of these batteries, kinda like a BIOS dump, and then put a locked one vs one that's unlocked (permanent fail flag removed), so that ppl have somewhere to resort to if say you bricked your BMS

Is Internet Archive an option here? Is it possible to add/remove files from there?
We could use bittorrent protocol https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist unless someone host ftp for us.

[kfzhu1229]

Is Internet Archive an option here? Is it possible to add/remove files from there?
We could use bittorrent protocol https://github.com/ngosang/trackerslist unless someone host ftp for us.

Hmm never tried that before. I was gonna say I could consider starting a megathread on this forum with me sharing my EEPROM binary dumps with onedrive or dropbox links and then others who have tried it with success follow suit. A little messy but definitely the easiest to set up
Like BIOS dumps though, if you naively flash an EEPROM dump without matching the FRU's first, you could permanently brick your chip!

[kfzhu1229]

Update on this matter: I have now gotten all the necessary components to make a "very limited production run", due to my own mistake with ordering the parts. It will be rectified in a week or two. See the for sale post for details
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