Skip to main content

PackProbe Reports Laptop Battery Health

The 18650 cell has become a ubiquitous standard in the lithium battery world. From power drills to early Tesla vehicles, these compact cells power all manner of portable devices. A particularly common use is in laptop batteries, where they’re often built into a pack using the Smart Battery System. This creates a smart battery that can communicate and report on its own status. PackProbe is a software tool built to communicate with these batteries, and you might just find it comes in handy.

The code runs on the WiFi-enabled Arduino Yún by default, but can be easily modified to suit other Arduino platforms. Communicating over SMBus using the Arduino’s I2C hardware, it’s capable of working with the vast majority of laptop batteries out there which comply with the Smart Battery System. With that standard being minted in 1994, it’s spread far and wide these days.

It’s a great way to harvest not only the specifications and manufacturing details of your laptop battery pack, but also to check on the health of the battery. This can give a clear idea over whether the battery is still usable, as well as whether the cells are worth harvesting for those in the recycling business.

You’re not limited to just the Arduino, though. There’s a similar tool available for the ESP8266, too.



from Hackaday https://ift.tt/2X0EZGV
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Play Doom – And More – On An NES

Doom was a breakthrough game for its time, and became so popular that now it’s essentially the “Banana For Scale” of hardware hacking. Doom has been ported to countless devices, most of which have enough processing ability to run the game natively. Recently, this lineup of Doom-compatible devices expanded to include the NES even though the system definitely doesn’t have enough capability to run it without special help. And if you want your own Doom NES cartridge, this video will show you how to build it . We featured the original build from [TheRasteri] a while back which goes into details about how it’s possible to run such a resource-intensive game on a comparatively weak system. You just have to enter the cheat code “RASPI”. After all the heavy lifting is done, it’s time to put it into a realistic-looking cartridge. To get everything to fit in the donor cartridge, first the ICs in the cartridge were removed (except the lockout IC) and replaced with custom ROM chips. Some modifica...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Flexible Permanence of Copper Tape Circuits

Somewhere between shoving components into a breadboard temporarily and committing them to a piece of protoboard or a PCB lies the copper tape method. This flexible Manhattan-style method of circuitry formed the basis for [Bunnie Huang]’s Chibitronics startup, and has since inspired many to stop etching boards and start fetching hoards of copper tape. [Hales] hit the ground running when he learned about this method , and has made many a copper tape circuit in the last year or so. He offers several nice tips on his site that speak from experience with this method, and he’ll even show you how to easily work an SMD breakout board into the mix. Generally speaking, [Hales] prefers plywood as the substrate to paper or cardboard for durability. He starts by drawing out the circuit and planning where all the tape traces will go and how wide they need to be. Then he lays out copper traces and pads, rubs the tape against the substrate to make it adhere strongly, and reinforces joints and laps w...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Newbie’s Guide To JTAG

Do you even snarf? If not, it might be because you haven’t mastered the basics of JTAG and learned how to dump, or snarf, the firmware of an embedded device. This JTAG primer will get you up to snuff on snarfing, and help you build your reverse engineering skills. Whatever your motivation for diving into reverse engineering devices with microcontrollers, JTAG skills are a must, and [Sergio Prado]’s guide will get you going. He starts with a description and brief history of the Joint Test Action Group interface, from its humble beginnings as a PCB testing standard to the de facto standard for testing, debugging, and flashing firmware onto devices. He covers how to locate the JTAG pads – even when they’ve been purposely obfuscated – including the use of brute-force tools like the JTAGulator . Once you’ve got a connection, his tutorial helps you find the firmware in flash memory and snarf it up to a file for inspection, modification, or whatever else you have planned. We always apprec...
Post a Comment
Read more