I've been playing around and researching the charging chip (almost this https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/bq30z554-r1 … 252FBQ30Z554-R1) and it's awful - you can't connect via I2C to reenable it as it's SHA protected with the password a secret, and it even blows a fuse (resistor) when it's decided the battery has failed so no chance of revival!

Even repairing the fuse didn't help as:

"Permanent Fail Safety Features
The FUSE pin can be used to blow an in-line fuse to permanently disable the battery pack from charging or
discharging. Upon a Permanent Fail event trigger, critical system information is written to non-volatile memory to
simplify failure analysis."

And you can't log in to the chip to reset the status.

What an awful design. I might make a new port on it and recharge the battery directly from an external source. Bit risky though with then having no protection circuit...

With a bit of a bodge I worked around the multiple blown fuses and it works!

It's not a great experience to be honest... It's just a bit laggy most of the time. I'm trying to get DeX to work on it now but I need a USB C hub with HDMI.

SteveC wrote on 2022-07-23, 14:44:

With a bit of a bodge I worked around the multiple blown fuses and it works!

It's not a great experience to be honest... It's just a bit laggy most of the time. I'm trying to get DeX to work on it now but I need a USB C hub with HDMI.

Hey Steve!

I've been working on a Superbook and found your post. Do you remember what you had to jump to get the battery working again?

Drexel Macintosh wrote on 2024-08-30, 18:59:

SteveC wrote on 2022-07-23, 14:44:

With a bit of a bodge I worked around the multiple blown fuses and it works!

It's not a great experience to be honest... It's just a bit laggy most of the time. I'm trying to get DeX to work on it now but I need a USB C hub with HDMI.

Hey Steve!

I've been working on a Superbook and found your post. Do you remember what you had to jump to get the battery working again?

Hi, I haven't touched this in a long time... I think I bridged out all the protection circuitry, this didn't really work though as if you leave it to go flat, it won't turn back on again, and you have to disassemble it to get it to start charging again directly onto the battery. If you keep it plugged in though it'll work, but I wasn't happy leaving it connected as I've made the battery potentially unsafe now. I seem to remember there not being any battery level indicator too so you didn't know when to plug in/unplug the charger.

Thank you so much for the reply!

Such an oddly failed design that they went with in the end of this one.

One final follow-up. Which setup did you use to manually charge the battery?