Adventures in laptop battery hacking
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- Опубликовано: 4 авг 2024
- Matthew Chapman
linux.conf.au/schedule/present...
When I bought a replacement battery for my laptop, little did I know that I was going to be up for an adventure just to get it to charge. Join me on a dive into the innards of laptops and laptop batteries, BIOS, ACPI, embedded controllers, vendor authentication schemes, and the remarkable way in which people come together on the Internet to solve problems.
"my device is mine - i should be able to modify it"
We don't even have the right to repair 99% of the time :@
The tech industry is so fucked.
Really nice to have a thinkpad, the community around it is interesting, I'm pretty sure that the latitude and other laptop dose not have that much interesting users. It's a shame that lenovo is killing that with all their new dumb design "Improvement".
Nice work and thanks to share
It's certainly created many interesting hacks... this is the second talk I've watched in as many days about people trying to hack their way around Lenovo's "improvements".
I used a Lenovo ONCE.... never ever again, I'm telling you.... yeuch! That awful excuse for a mouse.... the annoyance of Ubuntu crashing twice a day.... never again.... never ever again.
Haha really nice! We had one battery we had to throw away, just because the damn controller on the battery set the "pemanent failure" flag incorrectly...
2020, and this video has saved my life... Thank you
It would have been awesome if the gift at the end of the talk was an original Lenovo battery! LOL!
This man has to get to the end
Life used to be so much easier, when batteries ran out, you just replaced them, hacking devices meant you just cut the red wire. I'm sure glad these programming geniuses know all this stuff so I don't need to learn it.
Smart hack. It is wonderful if you can afford to spend the time to do things like that. Although you did a great job, I fear that it does not help a bit to avoid the implementation of smart batteries, smart chargers, smart ink cartridges and smart whatever. How much more time before a laptop bricks deliberately after some amount of elapsed time or processing hours because "the manufacturer cannot longer guarantee optimum performance after X hours of use?"
Nice hack, well done :)
SUFFICIENT DETERMINATION! This is the stuff of MANY grand, philosophical questions. Namely, "Does this task warrant my determination?", & "Does merely reaping some benefit warrant the initial motivation to carry out the task?" I say, "if there's Even any slight possibility that good Could come of it, then Go On and Be DETERMINED!"
Everybody talks about the fuse that blows when you try to replace the cells on your bat. You mentioned you need to replace the fuse. Where is this fuse ?. Can you post a pic ?.
Nice!
pretty cool
Quick link to Charlie Miller's talk that gets mentioned in this one: ruclips.net/video/_9ErnoLVxCA/видео.html
I find it highly amusing that there is a need to apologise for Windows. :D :D But then... I think "I'm the rdesktop guy" and then I think of how I used to curse "R ----ing Desktop" not because I found an particular fault with the software itself... just the "things that I would have to do" whilst running it.... so maybe it is right to apologise for Windows.
you can remove this problem by updating battery firmware avaailable at support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds001322
Lenovo is now selling low quality smartphones and other products. Old ThinkPad laptops have better material quality than todays model even the keyboard is better in old ones than new. Old Laptop Keyboards are far better than Apple MacBook keyboard. Why companies Like Lenovo build low quality products.
It's basic neo-liberal capitalism... minimise costs to the very lowest level... make optimal profits as quickly as possible... run away with all the money before the customers get too angry.
The irony that the last "great" (so-called) Communist country is the centre of this (lowest for of) capitalism is the greatest joke of all.
@@edgeeffect People should go to consumer court.
@@edgeeffect What is liberal about that, might as well call it neo con.
It's just same old greedy capitalist bs. The left and right terms are used to play you.
I was informed by someone in the industry that laptop batteries are prematurely terminated by software, to ensure revenue continues to flow to the computer company ....
Can anyone confirm this rumour?
LI-ion batteries should last many thousand cycles ..
dedication!
Can't say for all brands, but Apple Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries do last thousands of cycles. My MacBook Pro (15") is 3,5 years old now, use it every day, and it's max battery life is around 10 hours still
IDK, my old ThinkPad W500 stills with the original batteries (including the "ultra bay" one) for almost 10 years.
I think you have a slight misconception but are not entirely wrong. "Termination" in context of battery charging refers to the voltage or charge state, at which the charging is designed to stop, i.e. the state of the battery which is considered fully charged by the charge controller. There is a fundamental tradeoff between nominal capacity and ultimate life that is regulated by the termination voltage.
So older Li-Ion chemistries were safe to charge to 4.2V on the dot, and generally survived about 500-1000 cycles when used this way. Newer chemistries have been stabilised with newly discovered additives, and this presents an opportunity to go either way. Either you can raise the charge termination to 4.35V or so, and get a little bit of extra nominal capacity out of it, about 10-12% extra, and still offer a nominal life of 500 full charge discharge cycles for the vast majority of cells. Or you can retain 4.20V charge termination, then the cells are likely to do 2000-5000 full charge discharge cycles. If you consider a likely life of the device of 500 cycles, i.e. 2 years give or take, then retaining the classic 4.20V termination is still the more consumer friendly choice, as over this life, there will be more actual capacity of the cell left throughout device lifecycle, as the battery will degrade and lose capacity slower. If you believe devices or device batteries should last 5 years, chasing nominal capacity at the cost of life becomes outright indefensible.
I don't know what charge termination laptops are going for nowadays. In phones, the increased termination voltage of 4.35V is basically universal, has been for a long time. I think the laptops made say 7-9 years ago already were in part using vastly improved cells, but weren't yet usually pushing termination voltage to the very edge of what they will suffer - but an odd defective cell that dies early still happens. The laptop in this talk is a 2013 laptop, and its battery life ran out after 2-3 years presumably due to a single defective cell rather than expected decay.
So if you were thinking there is some kind of cycle counting that kills off or "terminates" the battery after a time, this is incorrect. But there exists this kind of engineering tradeoff that is being used in a manner hostile to the customer, which limits useful life, and prioritises on-paper specs over actual user experience over the lifetime of device.