- The electronic controller of the baterries is made by Texas Instruments (BQ2085 and BQ29311PW). They can e order as samples.

- If you try to replace the Li ION cells, the controlles will blow up a fuse (3 or 5 terminal fuse), and even if you fix it with a thin wire, it wont work anymore again. This fuse is a special one, that can be blowed intentionally by the controller. - The memory which holds the state, and the info deciding not to work again seems to be contained external to the controller chips. Hope this helps for others taking their hands on those batteries. http://www.powerstream.com/LiPSO2.htm http://www.nrgresearch.com/ http://www.laptopbatteries.com/

# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues

by Codeman May 07, 2005 @ 9:06 pm

Continued from previous The charge indicator on my laptop continuously flashed 3 orange flashes followed by one green flash - VERY ANNOYING. The onboard battery charger, which has 5 LED's, would flash the 3 odd-numbered LED's when the test button was pressed. (a weird reading with no documented meaning - probably a fault indicator for service technicians) Also, the toolbar battery icon indicated 0% charge. It turns out that my fuse was blown, but fixing the problem goes a bit beyond the fuse - as you will read next in section 2. 2) How to fix: (Reading this through first before proceeding is recommended) First you will need to disassemble the battery. Doing this is VERY dangerous and not recommended. However, if one needs to disassemble a sealed rechargeable battery the following is how to proceed. The battery is sealed with ultra-sonic plastic welding, and you can use a flat head screwdriver to pry the casing apart at the seam to break the welds. DO NOT push the screwdriver inside the battery case as you may inadvertently cross the cell terminals and cause a fire/explosion. Also, be nice to the casing as you will need to re-assemble and make use of the pack when done. Once apart you will see that the battery pack is made up of 3-6 cylindrical devices which are the lithium or Ni-MH cells. In the case of my Dell Latitude D600 battery there are 6 cells total. The cells are grouped into 2 sets of 3 cells in series. These 2 sets of 3 are connected in parallel to generate 11.1 volts. You will notice a few wires - two of them probably black and red - in my case, these are the mains wires that connect to the "power" circuit boards. Continued in next post

# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues

by Codeman May 07, 2005 @ 9:08 pm

Continued from previous . The battery's controller circuitry in my case is divided into two boards - one being the "power board", which contains the fuse, switching transistors, and the connector that plugs into the laptop. The second board contains the actual charging controller, and therefore I will make reference to it as the "control board". The two boards are connected at a right angle with a removable ribbon cable. To fix your battery you will need to identify the fuse, which, in my case was located on the bottom side of the power board and designated F101 on the PCB. This fuse has three terminals but only two of them appear to be meaningful. Two terminals are located on one side and a single terminal on the other. You will need to bridge the two side-by-side terminals with a small wire - I used a 28 AWG wire as to maintain some of the function of the fuse - "a weak link". To get to the fuse you will need to separate the two control boards just gently pull apart the ribbon cable. USE EXTREME caution where you position the boards and wires - the battery cells are likely charged and a stray wire or contact could result in a short circuit and possibly a fire or explosion!! Once you bridge the two fuse terminals reassemble the two boards by reconnecting the ribbon cable. Pay particular attention to where the plastic guards went - these are the sheets placed under the circuit boards that come into direct contact with the battery cells. Their job is

to keep the solder joints from coming into contact with the battery cells - VERY IMPORTANT. Put the boards and battery cells back into the bottom side of the casing (this is the side with the battery tester window). Continued in next post

# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues

by Codeman May 07, 2005 @ 9:09 pm

Continued from previous You may think you are all done and ready to put the whole thing back together but you are not. The battery is in fact probably fixed, but when you separated the power and control boards the battery charge controller probably got really pissed. You can check by pressing the battery test button - nothing will light up. This is because the controller is powered independently by two other wires - in my case a yellow and white one. So, the whole time you work on the battery the controller is powered up and detected when you pulled the ribbon connector and went into a "lockdown" state. (why this happens I don't know; catastrophic fault, anti-tamper, or whatever - it just happens) To fix this problem just de-solder both the yellow and white wires that run to the control board and wait a minute and reconnect them. This allows the controller chip to reset and forget about what just happened. After that carefully reassemble the pack using a few dabs of super glue along the seam and tape it together so the glue can cure. Once completed power down your laptop and unplug it. Install the battery and connect your laptop to power - but leave it off. If successful, your charging light will flash only green, and if this is the case then you can power up the computer and you should be all set. Continued in next post An aside note - I have been using my laptop for two weeks without any issue and have experienced great battery performance. I have noticed though, that my battery charge indicator randomly flashes green even when the battery shows full charge in the toolbar. Also, the on-board battery charge indicator still indicates a weird - 3 out of 5 odd-numbered flashing green lights. Probably because the controller still remembers the fault occurring. Other than those two anomalies, everything works great. Good luck!

# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues

by Archi May 08, 2005 @ 2:42 am

I own Dell Latitude C600 with new DELL Japan-made battery 66Whr (cannot remember the date when I first used it - something around 1 year). Few days ago it just died - notebook suddenly powered off after 1 hour of work (battery has been presumably charged completely). Charging LED is off and when I removed the battery from the bay and pressed the test there were no any lights (even no 13-5-light-of-death). BIOS could see the battery and reports it as CHARGING with 0%. Looks like dead beef for me... I found some replacement on eBay (new one is maid in China 'replacement' battery - but price is good) and then decided to take a look into the battery. I had small experience with some older notebook batteries it was not too easy to disassemble them. But unfortunately this one was better - I pried it with the knife, cracked some thin parts and voila - it's open (there is lot of sticky stuff inside like dual-side scotch). Good magnifying glass and I was able to check the PCB and read all chips names. Google is your best friend - but here it failed references to those chips (bq29310 and bq8011) are only found at some China sites selling the surplus. I just knew that bq-chips are the production of the Texas Instruments - so I went to TI site - and failed again - no bq8xxx at all, and no bq29310. But after additional researches I found some newer close replacements for those chips. I took the PDF containing the example application - and what did I see? ...to be continued...

# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues

by Archi May 08, 2005 @ 2:42 am

...continued... I saw the schematics of the internal PCB! It is not quite the same but very-very close. Now I was able to check the voltages on the PCB (I did not mention that all cells looked healthy and I used the car lamp to load them and check). Additional hour of pocking the tip into the PCB (one have to unsolder terminals on sides of the PCB to get an access to chips) and I found the broken part. It was the 6.8 Ohm resistor in line with chips power supply! Example schematic did not contain this part so I decided just to short the resistor. And my battery is alive again! Its now charging in my notebook so I did not checked the capacity yet but at least its working! Tomorrow Ill

fully assemble it and recheck if it was possible damaged by my experiments, also will take some photos of the internals. So if somebody have those abruptly dead Dell batteries (1691P, 75UHF, 66Whr) with no LED on at all may be you guys also could fix them? If somebody is interested Ill try to make some manual about the checking the battery internals and will make it available on my site. If you want to see the Smart Battery data stored in internal EEPROM memory, like Manufacturer Date, Charging current, Voltage etc, you can try the software from: http://www.microsys.ro/accplus.htm or http://www.passmark.com/products/batmon.htm