Good day folks. I recently managed to score a Samsung NP300E5C laptop which was sold as defective, so I took the gamble and turns out all that was wrong with it was a broken power jack, so it was a snap to get it going again. 8Gb of RAM and a modest i5 CPU on it - worth saving.
Unfortunately the battery is totally dead, not that you'd expect otherwise for a laptop this old, so I wanted to mess around with it and see if I can replace some of its cells to at least allow me to move it from one room to the other without having to shut it down every time I have to pull the adapter.
I popped the battery open and found the 6 cells. Three sets in series. I applied 11v to the ends of the pack, limited to 1a from my power supply and charged them up for several hours. Measured the 3 sets of cells afterwards and sure enough they all read the same 3.7v, so the pack itself was fine...what gives ? Turns out the laptop refuses to run on battery if the battery itself tells it it's past its due, even though the cells are fine. How can it do that ? I did a bit of research and found that there's a little controller chip on that board there - the BQ20z in my case which I pictured there - which is responsible for this. Apparently it can be reprogrammed to reset the battery to factory conditions, so I did some digging and found this software BE2Works which supposedly does the job. It looked promising enough to give it a try, but then I realised I have no idea how to connect up to the battery...the official site, as well as some videos I found, show some sort of adapter that does this. Without it, the software just says "No adapter found" and doesn't even start so I can at least look at the GUI. The site lists some "official" hardware, the simplest of which seems to be that CP2112, which I managed to find fairly cheap on Ali, but I wonder if it can be done some other way. I already have a CH341 programmer which supports I2C, so I was hoping I could used that instead. Trouble is the software only likes playing with the hardware listed there, so I'm not sure it can be fooled to read from other devices.
I managed to identify the data and clock pins (SDA/SCL) on the battery connector, since they were thankfully labeled on the backside of the board there, but accessing them is going to be tough. Has anyone successfully done this hack before to make it remotely worth it ? Any ideas ? Cheers guys.
Unfortunately the battery is totally dead, not that you'd expect otherwise for a laptop this old, so I wanted to mess around with it and see if I can replace some of its cells to at least allow me to move it from one room to the other without having to shut it down every time I have to pull the adapter.
I popped the battery open and found the 6 cells. Three sets in series. I applied 11v to the ends of the pack, limited to 1a from my power supply and charged them up for several hours. Measured the 3 sets of cells afterwards and sure enough they all read the same 3.7v, so the pack itself was fine...what gives ? Turns out the laptop refuses to run on battery if the battery itself tells it it's past its due, even though the cells are fine. How can it do that ? I did a bit of research and found that there's a little controller chip on that board there - the BQ20z in my case which I pictured there - which is responsible for this. Apparently it can be reprogrammed to reset the battery to factory conditions, so I did some digging and found this software BE2Works which supposedly does the job. It looked promising enough to give it a try, but then I realised I have no idea how to connect up to the battery...the official site, as well as some videos I found, show some sort of adapter that does this. Without it, the software just says "No adapter found" and doesn't even start so I can at least look at the GUI. The site lists some "official" hardware, the simplest of which seems to be that CP2112, which I managed to find fairly cheap on Ali, but I wonder if it can be done some other way. I already have a CH341 programmer which supports I2C, so I was hoping I could used that instead. Trouble is the software only likes playing with the hardware listed there, so I'm not sure it can be fooled to read from other devices.
I managed to identify the data and clock pins (SDA/SCL) on the battery connector, since they were thankfully labeled on the backside of the board there, but accessing them is going to be tough. Has anyone successfully done this hack before to make it remotely worth it ? Any ideas ? Cheers guys.
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