Post by plutronus on Aug 1, 2020 18:23:19 GMT
Yep...My HP LapTop's battery took a crap and never came back. In the system bar the charge indicator depicted "7% charge". So I looked around using duckduckgo.com search engine (doesn't track ya & share your data with skunkrat spammers as those google liberal creeps do), searching for info on this type charging failure. Turns out that the HP battery has a serial number coded internally inside the battery's Lithium-Ion cell controller electronics. And once in a while it hiccups, which causes a device driver in the OS to misreport the charge status. There is a proceedure to 'reset' the glitch, which I performed, but did not resolve the problem. And, HP offers on their website an HP LapTop System Component Test utility for free download, which I downloaded. Hah hah hah, but, when I ran the battery and AC power-supply test, both 'aborted' the test with a 'Test Cancelled' error message, and no information about what that error means?!!! Now that is a truely useful test tool!! Those HP (Carly Fiorina programmers, "who'd wanna wake up to a face like that?!", Pr Trump during debate), must've been smoking crack when they wrote that 'test' program!
I visited HP and frankly, they want tooooo much money for the replacement battery, so I hopped up on to eBay, and there, literally hundreds of Chinese HP clone battery vendors selling "authentic OEM battery", only none of them have any association with HP's Chinese manufacturing organization. Those batteries sell for around $14 + Free Shipping, while new HP batteries sell for around $100. So I bumped into an American seller who was offering an "open-box" an authentic HP battery for $15 + $6 shipping. I knew when I bought it that the battery was a pig-in-a-poke. I contacted the vendor and chatted with him about it, he told me that he bought the battery along with a bunch of other items at an auction, and that everything else he sold had been ok, but if it was no good, send it back for refund. So I bought it.
It arrived on time, fast ship, but when I opened the box, and I pulled the battery out, I saw a flash, a little mini-vision, I saw a pair of hands cut the antistatic bag end off, pull out the new battery and replaced it with the bad battery. These little visions, are like seeing a movie taken with single frame camera snap. The entire movie is contained in a single frame!
I knew that I had bought a bad battery! I plugged in to my LapTop. The LapTop did not even detect its presence, no charge indication, nada, nothing. I ran the HP Component Diagnostic test on it, and agin it aborted with a "Test Canceled" (must be a carry over from the "cancel culture" sweeping our country by the liberal moronic 'thinkers' out there).
So, I took it apart to see what inside of the battery case, heh heh, guess what? There are eight, 18650 3.7Vdc 3200mA batteries connected in parallel/serial arrangement + a lithium-ion charge/discharge controller circuit PCB. So, removed the batteries, cut the spot-welded tabs apart, unsoldered the charge controller and checked each of the batteries with my Fluke Lab DVM (high input impedance...fancy digital Volt-Ohm-Meter). Six of the batteries registered 0.01 Vdc, which is way below the minimum discharge value of LiOn batteries, while 2, registered 2.6Vdc! I hooked each one up individually at a time, those batteries on my Current/Voltage programmable lab power-supply (quick and dirty test 'charger'), which I programmed to output 4.2Vdc and 1.0 Amperes of charge current. Initially each battery pulled the Volts down to around 3.0Vdc, while the current was 1 Amp, after about 15 minutes, the indicated current value started dropping to under 1 Amp, and the Voltage was increasing, 3.1, 3.4, 3.9, etc. The two batteries charged up. I put the other six batteries one by one on the power-supply, but each of them pulled 0.0 current, and the Voltage indication was 4.2Vdc...they were open...deader than a door nail!
Then I pulled apart my original failing HP LapTop battery, and discovered that all 8 of those batteries were good, so the charge controller electronics had failed in that battery pack. If I hadn't torn up the case so badly, I could have put the 8 good batteries into the eBay battery with its good charge controller and I would have had a good battery. But getting those cases open required drakkonian strategy of hacking, cracking, tearing and hammering!!
The "silver lining" in all of this, is that 18650 batteries, with or without protection circuits sell for around $10 each, and I now have 10 useful 18650 batteries.
For those who are unaware, the battery number is dimensions in metric, the 18 is 18mm diameter, and the 650 number represents 65.0 mm long, or 0.7 Inch Diameter x 2.55 Inches Long. These are powerful batteries, about three times the power of 2x American size 'D' cells.
I have few photos which I'll upload later for you to oggle.
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And here they are...
At the top, 8x 18650 batteries from the original HP battery pack, seperated and all tested good.
At the bottom, the eBay batteries still attached to each other and to the battery pack charge controller electronics.
plutronus
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