That’s just it. Any news on turning the 55Wh battery into a portable powerbank? Ever since the 61Wh battery came out it was mentioned that the 55Wh could be upcycled into a portable powerbank. I know it wouldn’t hold much power but it would be more useful than just sitting on my shelf collecting dust as e-waste.
Is this expected to be a community driven thing or is Framework actively working on this? Has anyone actually made one yet?
That’s a good question! Love to know, since it has been awhile. Perhaps I missed FW saying or giving an indication.
I seen a few people make threads saying they were interested in doing it, but they all seem to discontinue once they learn that laptop batteries are have a bms which you’d probably need to talk to over SMBus before it will allow full use. Framework’s mainboard embedded controller firmware is open source, so in there one should be able to find everything the battery requires over the SMBus.
Personally though, I don’t know if I would feel comfortable with a kit or individual made & sold battery pack case. Large li-ions just contain too much energy & with all li-ions the consequences can be too high if you don’t ensure they’re always treated cautiously, monitored, and kept well within it’s limits.
It would likely not be a big issue but I currently got better batteries around to make powerbanks out of so no real need on my end. All it would really take is an adapter board with the right connector and something like a IP2638 board set to 4S and limited to 60W and a case of course. The hardest to obtain bit there are the connectors.
The before mentioned bms would take care of most of these issues, apart from the stabbing the battery bit but that allready exists with the diy nature of the laptop.
Power banks typically have no or very primitive BMS with only cell balancing and inaccurate capacity measurements. It might be simpler to just remove the BMS and hook the cells onto a basic balancer, then connect to a bidirectional buck-boost, with adjusted voltage and current according to the battery configuration
The proprietary BMS is an artificial barrier restricting versatility of the battery pack. Open-source it (or at least publish the unseal and full access code to enable customizability) to lower the barrier so developers can make use of the spare battery. Now users and third-party developers are having a hard time of even a simple task such as BMS suicide prevention.
Might as well keep the fancy bms that is already on there. Most dedicated powerbank chipsets don’t have their own balancing or bms, that is either added externally or omitted entirely (no balancing → pb rbreak faster → gotta get a new one). for the bms bit they tend to have just primitive cell voltage monitoring if anything at all.
I certainly would not trust most normal users to safely cut out the bms from a pouch cell based laptop battery.
Because of this, I think a power bank using laptop battery pack is simply impractical. To communicate with the BMS and get all the correct values will cost the charge controller more than buying an off-the-shelf power bank
I dissembled some power banks including high powered ones. They all have a balancing circuit, a power bank without balancing may cause explosion should a degraded cell overcharge so it’s a no-go. some of them are included on the PCB, others are on a separate board closer to the cells (charge controller closer than input/output). Many use basic MOSFET with a 330Ω each cell
That’s the neat part you can just not do that. Set the power bank controller to 4.2V (or even 4.25) per cell and both parties will be perfectly happy with that’s going on without ever talking to each other.
All of the commercial ones I opened had per cell monitoring, so overcharging a single cell is not a problem, they however did not all have balancing. Also the batteries of some no name cordless vacuum had balancing on the pcb but just straight up did not populate it. It is unfortunately a thing.