Hi there,
Openning an old MSI GE72 I found the battery is made of regular cell made by LG or samsung. (things like Cellule Samsung INR21700-50S 5000mAh - 35A ).
It is possible for example on a Electric scooter from xiaomi to replace the dead cells instead of the complet battery.
It would be nice to have some kind of square cells of course to fite inside our FW 13s…
This would certainly be possible for Framework 16 via the Expansion Bay System, but the FW13 has too little clearance internally to fit circular cells.
Theoretically yes but practically it’s a lot more complicated. In multi-cell batteries it is important to keep them balanced so if you dropped a fresh cell in with a few slightly degraded ones that would continuously throw the pack out of balance, potentially more than the balancing circuitry can handle. For laptops it’s generally better to replace all cells with fresh/matched ones.
There is also the point that laptop batteries are extremely cautious, anything weird happens and the bms literally kills the battery. So you usually need to do some “open heart surgery” to actually replace laptop cells since you can’t disconnect the old ones and then connect the new ones.
E-scooter batteries on one hand have more cells, meaning a single cell makes much less of a difference in overall capacity and also have generally simpler bms systems.
This.
Cracking the BMS is literally the hardest part of repairing laptop battery packs. I hate artificial barriers just like you do (and possibly OP)
I brought an EV2400 module but the software can only be downloaded at TI website as I spent several hours finding it elsewhere but failed. TI demands an account to download the bq software but I stuck here, I guess the website just hates me…
The few times I have done it I did the open heart method, that of course won’t work to repair completely dead batteries.
But even if you can override the software lock you do also need to replace the suicide fuse.
I quite heavily dislike them but in this case it’s at least not entirely malicious. Batteries are dangerous and people tend not to dispose of them correctly so the suicide fuse and full discharge thing do have merit even if it sucks for the rest of us. Can’t have nice things.
Another possible reason is to prevent shady second-hand dealers to “reset the odometer” of the battery, making it looks like new.
IMO the best way for now, is to leave the factory battery unmodified and 3D print a large expansion module case and put more modular batteries inside
