[Rob] grew tired of his Makita power tool battery packs dying so he figured out how to repair them himself. The video after the break walks us through the process which starts by cracking open the case. Inside there is a controller board and a battery of ten cells. [Rob] has pinpointed these battery failures to just the first cell, which is confirmed by measuring the cell voltages with a multimeter. The first cell in the demonstration battery reads zero volts and needs to be replaced. For some reason he’s got heck of a lot of these cells on hand, at the end of the video he shows off a massive block of them that provides one half of a kilowatt-hour of power.
To complete the resurrection he removed the control circuitry from the integrated PCB. It seems that the microcontroller on the battery’s PCB monitors it and bricks them when it thinks the life of the unit has ended. By hacking a charger he can now balance-charge the altered battery packs and get more use out of them before they hit the landfill.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5taguEdlkY]
Is there any progress on other solutions? Hacking the microcontroller on PCB would be interesting…
Nothing new about that chip?
At first this guy appears to be delusional. He keeps saying that Konion cells self balance when charged in series. Turned out that he intentionally lied in order to sell used Makita packs. He did a very good job, hundred of members on Endless Sphere forum took the bait and bought his used batteries. Some of them still believe the self balance. This is a professional Canadian scammer.
on alibaba are pcb for bl1830, someone know something about it? maybe we can change the genuine with one of these to get a fully working battery pack?!
These 18650 Li-ion cells are great. I recovered about 200 of them from dead laptop batteries in the recycle bin at my former job, fixed up all of them except for about 1% (totally unrecoverable), contrived a charge controller, and configured a rechargeable battery bank to run my porch lights in the summer time.
Thanks for this, I’ll try to do this to my power tool kits Makita.
I think this is very good idea about repairing the Makita Battery Pack. But video the tutorial has been removed, I found. I think, the tutorial is more helpful in this case.
I have quite a few of the new star pcb’s for the 2.0ah available but they are £12 each these are all tested in a charger fitted to new batteries before shipping. i also have re-chipped batteries for sale on Ebay