Makita battery pack repair

posted Jan 12th 2010 2:00pm by Mike Szczys
filed under: tool hacks

[Rob] grew tired of his Makita power tool battery packs dying so he figured out how to repair them himself. The video after the break walks us through the process which starts by cracking open the case. Inside there is a controller board and a battery of ten cells. [Rob] has pinpointed these battery failures to just the first cell, which is confirmed by measuring the cell voltages with a multimeter. The first cell in the demonstration battery reads zero volts and needs to be replaced. For some reason he’s got heck of a lot of these cells on hand, at the end of the video he shows off a massive block of them that provides one half of a kilowatt-hour of power.

To complete the resurrection he removed the control circuitry from the integrated PCB. It seems that the microcontroller on the battery’s PCB monitors it and bricks them when it thinks the life of the unit has ended. By hacking a charger he can now balance-charge the altered battery packs and get more use out of them before they hit the landfill.

Go there...
http://hackaday.com/2010/01/12/makita-battery-pack-repair/