Answering the questions that no one cares about - just like real science. Tool testing, analysis, and destruction. In-depth looks at how tools work, what their limits are, and busting tool myths.
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you are misleading people There is no balancing, there is only voltage control to cut off the battery operation if necessary, you present it nicely in pictures and on paper but in practice it has no reference, what will you say looking at this film, where is the balancing that you talk about so nicely? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XyJzXx0Vbpc.htmlsi=9A0e9Xh3nFPf4Agi
Lidl made a big deal out of their new batteries a couple of years back, as they added balancing and bluetooth. At the time I was a bit shocked, because I assumed all 18V batteries already had balancing. What a fool I was.
The only way i can see why people said Makita batteries are better is they use Murata VTC 6 on their 5Ah batteries 3Ah they use the same low quality cells as others including Ryobi i have a older Makita 4Ah but not sure what year it is, i can send you a pic of the board it doesn’t have the big chip instead it has two smaller one
Amazing how much time and dedication you put in doing this, Thank You i read many of these different year version of M18 12Ah due to imbalance, i found they rely on Samsung 40T poorly made, same cells used in DeWalt Flexvolt 12Ah, Bosch uses version 2, same issue. Milwaukee for short period of time switched to using Murata VTC6a but most of them have bad board which won’t charge. then they switch back to Samsung 40T version 3 which i have yet to see any bad one. Again no balancing, just rely on the cells itself.
@@toolscientist i have them but sold them very quick and based on feedback from customer that they love it on the other hand, some of 8Ah and 12Ah board would kill and drain some bank to 0v, i caught one 8Ah that quite warm to around 35C in the area of the lights meter and drain the 2nd bank from the terminal to 1.4v so i quickly remove both ends of the main terminal i am kind of shock these multi million dollars tool companies don’t really test out what they design ?
@toolscientist in Lebanon they are almost in every hardware store as a technician I do repairs for both the battery and the charger as well as the device itself such as impact drivers drills grinders and so on
I am watching you from Russia and I think that you are doing a decent job for all owners of the M18 tool (even though I am not one of them) but I am still grateful to you for this, thank you!
I’d love to know which tool brands actually balance their batteries so I can switch to them. Ryobi, Ego, Stihl, Makita, Metabo? I hope you’re able to keep test other brands. This is good stuff to know.
They probably have their extra service charger where they put in warrantied batteries that actually do only charge to three bars inside the warranty frame, which balances the cells and then can return it to the customer as fixed. You should sell your solution to unhappy customers as a an add on that you put between the charger and the battery for charging which activates the balancers. When the information spreads you should be able to sell a lot.
The only battery took I own is a leafblower. Rest is corded. Cheap cheap Amazon Teppco leafblower. Went for the 28V max super bla bla battery as I felt like it. Paid 75€ for the whole kit in 2018 and it still works fine. Balances the cells perfectly has 4Ah 28V and has over 1000 cycles on it. During fall more obviously but also in summer. We run an inspection bay and when oldtimer cars come in it helps to blow out the smell and once a day to clean the parking lot so fair to say it at least does half a cycle a day although I often did 2-4 cycles a day in fall. Only issue is you can feel the voltage drop now when you push the indicator and turn on the leafblower. Also the battery gets handwarm after a full cycle which means the cells are way warmer but they heat up so uniformely that I have a constant velocity for a long time. When cheap chinesium can do it, why can't reputable brand? Then they wonder why people buy knock-offs
I'm just starting to add balance leads to my Dyson. I tested a bricked pack & all cells were fine but the cell causing the fault has about 5% more capacity than the others & the circuit cripples itself when the voltage balance goes out to far. There must be money to be made in making a better BMS. Maybe one that charged each cell seperately to the correct voltage and one with a button to select storage charge for those that only use a device once every two months.
Great video, I've replaced a couple of the BMS' on the milwaukee packs with ones from Aliexpress and I wonder if they do any balancing as they look like they have some chips for it.
@@toolscientist They seem to have a few variants, some a lot more packed than others. The problem I had with one of them is that the nickel strips that come installed on the bms are too small for the current required and ran hot.
A) You need to get a kinky girlfriend. Your needs are starting to bleed though a little bit. B) Can you upload custom code to the micro controller? It would be funny as hell if you found a way to cram load balancing down their throats....
A) I am merely a reflection of society. So really it's you, as a member of that society, that is to blame. B) They often have features that let the OEM lock the chip after programming, but I haven't looked into whether or not their MCUs do this. Someone made an open source firmware for Dyson as they were doing the same thing (i.e. having all the balancing hardware, but not using it). I think best course of action is to shame Milwaukee into fixing their code. It would take them 1-day of coding and a few days of testing. Making open source code would take me a year and then hardly anyone would use it due to the difficulty and risk of flashing firmware to a MCU.
@@toolscientist A) I reject any responsibility for you needing a kinky girlfriend. Mine isn't keen on the whole loan-to-random-youtuber thing and the whole mail order bride thing became illegal, so you'll have to sort that one yourself. Seeing you have good probing skills and can tie a decent nut, that shouldn't be a problem :P B) Good points. But do throw your findings at the guys who ganked Dyson. Milwaukee is probably more inclined to act if someone can say "look how well it works!".
Would be cool if you could contact TTI and ask for a statement. Using someone like @TorqueTestChannel might get you further than "normal" customer support.
I'd prefer to stay off Milwaukee's radar, but for all I know I'm already on it. This video has 6 dislikes after 14 hours, whereas all my others only had 1 dislike after 24 hours. I think I'm too small of a fish to get a reply from Milwaukee, or even TTC. Maybe we should start a harassment campaign on their socials where we ask "where's our balancing firmware?" on every post. To be fair, we should do it to Dewalt, too :-)
I'd try reaching out through another big channel thats not afraid of legal trouble. This seems like an obvious error on their site. Could they produce a clip that updates the firmware on the pack without opening it?
@@tschuuuls486 the batteries can communicate with the charger using the 2nd and 4th pins. I've heard that service techs can interface with it to pull diagnostic data. It might be possible that they've designed it so they can adjust parameters via this interface, but I doubt it. It would almost be more damning if that were the case. It would mean they knew about it, and had built in a way to fix it if they needed, but held off until it was discovered.
@@toolscientist it probably comes down to if the Microcontroller they used can be flashed over the exposed pins. Unless it's just a config thing, then it might be easier to fix.
Maybe balancing work only on new batteries? Or only in batteries with less than (threshold here) charge cycles? Then they just out of warranty and designed to die.
I guess for customer loyalty. Main reason I'm shifting to Makita 40V is the Milwaukee 12Ah packs failure rate. I had 2 of 3 of my packs do the "3 bars of doom" just outside of warranty
Simoly amazing video. Short and to the point. You have validated what I've been noticing with my 9 and 12 Ah 18 V batteries. I've been noticing after onlynone to two years of normal nonintensive use that I'm getting three bars at full charged. I discivwred many videos on RU-vid from 3 to 5 uears ago that many used the primitive t3chnique of cimbing two batteries in paralel with two wires to recharge and calibrate a dead battery that flashed geen and red on the charger. A cliser look myself bynopening my own batteries and doing some research on basic knowledge of cell balancing li-ion 18650 and 21700 cells (of which in youtube there are countless videos English and abroad) got me the clue of imbalanced cells very quicly with a simple multimeter. And I found out the big 9 and 12Ah hour basically only have 5 balance leads. My Aha moment. While the best quality setup has a lead between all cells, as far as I can tell milwaukee batteries look like to have a 3P5S lead configuration. So balance leads for every goup of 3 cells times 5! No wonder there is voltage drift and cells impbalnce. I have found by rebalacing cells by using a a cheap Chinese 30 V power supply I could easily rebalance every group of 3 cells to a designated voktage. Once the cells had less than 20 mv difference I put them back on the charger for the last charge and balance and that solved both the error code on the charger and that I had 4 bars. All this by bypassing the corcuit board by simply charging 3 groups of cells over the leads. Unfortunately on one 9 and 12 Ah batteries of the 4 one group of cells can't maintain their voltage so I think the batteries have failed and likely have a resistance issue and cells need replacing. Your discovery of the microcintroller and balance controller is interesting. I wouldn't have thought there was a cell balancer on the board but more that the controller had a more refined managemt of power to charge charachteristics tonprotect more from exceptions in overvoltage and undervoltge scenarios through complex feedback loops. Having seen your research in actually teally shocked how bad the software is and that for the new battery price it doesn't even have a 15 cell balance lead. I'm convinced with my experience and cirrent growing knowledge that it would have had much better durabilty qualities if it had a better balancing system. With this video it has actually confirmed my worries. It has made me more hesitant in power tool.batteries. Milwaukee batteries do have great power performance, but I personally think from my own tonker8ng and experience it would have had much better durability performance if it did have some sort of active balancing between daily ise cases. I think the way the balancer works os somoly underpowered and that the power ise attracts quicker cell imbalance which imoedes performance faster, while I think if the cells could rebalance themselves between the 15 cells you would have a better power to endurance characteristic. There are plenty of interesting videos onthis such Korean diy addictor and the the australian electric garage channels. Bit there are also others. I had a suspicion the new forge batteries still had the same issue. I Watched the tool show (previous crew of belts and boxes). I shared my concerns recently on a live show on Mikwaukee US pioeline 2024, but I didn't getbthe impression understood the gravity of my concerns. I wouldn't be surprised the stacked packs don't have a decent cell balancing system as well. And I think perhaps a lot could be kearned from decent cell balancing with Tesla cars that hasn'tbcome to the collective consciousness yet. I do think it's goingbto be a growing concern with many multicell packs in the future. I think for now we're to late to see a meaningful change for current "classic" milwaukee packs and the "new" forge packs for the next 5 years. Milwaukee wants their return on investment and likelynthe mindset will remain about comsumption-"fast "air cooled" charging"- and consumptive behavior. rather than more reliable and durable batteries. I don't do daily jobs with power tools and have also come to appreciate milwaukkee batteries as power banks for other applications and charging and poweringbother tools in the house and in the car. I think this trend will cintinue that people also want to do more different thinks around the home and other sotuations than tools exclusively. In my view I think the battery quality will be even more important in my view than the tool going forward. Right now I think there is more emphasis on the tool than the qulaitative functionality of the battery, with milwaukee but also their competitors. ButbI do hope all power tool brands see this issue and that it is fixed and quality controlled fast. Because with current quality of EV batteries and EV battery technologies all power tool batteries are not looking very good in terms of quality, (functional) design and performance. Excellent video. Thanks!
15 balance leads wouldn't help. Each parallel group of 3 cells is already tied together and always at the same voltage. Theoretically you could do something like Dewalt Flexvolt and have the pack isolate the cells for individual charging/balancing, then reconnect them for discharge. This would be more complex and more failure prone, though. Having cells in parallel is very common in EVs and battery storage. The problem here is that they have just chosen/forgotten to not enable balancing in their software.
If you can read the MCU and AFE part numbers, that would be very helpful. You'll need a magnifying glass and a strong light that you can move around to get the right angle. There's sometimes too much coating, though. I've scratched mine off on a few packs, but they were out of warranty anyway. I don't want you to void your warranty.
Another useful thing would be measuring the resistances of R7, R9, R11, R12, and R13 with a multimeter. You need decent probes and to push fairly hard to get through the coating. If you're not confident in doing this, then please don't, I don't want you to damage your new battery.
@@darthtater ok, thanks for trying. I've had good luck with sewing needles, but you'll need to secure them to your probes somehow. Helping hands can be risky. I let the smoke out of a battery using needles and helping hands, that's why I made these spring loaded probes that I briefly showed in the vid. Anyway, don't worry about it too much. I'll prob buy one in the next few months. It looks different enough to justify testing.
@@r0000g it's coming. I have Makita 40V, M12, and Ryobi 36V as my personal tools, and I'll do those before buying others. Also have to do Dewalt's flexvolt and powerstack as I have those from my Dewalt vid but decided they were different enough to warrant their own vid.
@@stevebabiak6997 yes, just another one of those annoying things where they use different labelling and product numbers between regions. It's mostly so it's harder for regions to tell if they're getting ripped off and reduce grey-market imports, but it just makes it harder to research products and find answers for problems.
Maybe, but doing it in a way that's demonstratable is pretty risky for the reputation of premium tool brand. It might just be that they couldn't get it to work reliably. Maybe even someone disabled it years ago and forgot to re-enable it.
@@chadkrause6574 one of my theories is that they had too much noise in their system so they had to jack up he R value to filter it out. The reference design is using 47 Ohm resistors, so they've gone 20x higher. The other option is that 20x higher R means 20x smaller C on the input cacpacitors (there's a cap between each cell pin). So maybe it's because they ran out of space on the board? But then there's no components on the underside, so there was space available but maybe they wanted to save money?
@@toolscientist I guess that’s possible but they could use 0201 components elsewhere to make space, plus they seem to have room. And how much noise is there really in a battery system when charging or balancing with no load on the tool?
@@toolscientisthowever, the fact they keep rereading cell voltages may mean there is a bad programmer in the mix. 4mA balancing current isn’t completely unuseable if these batteries sit on the charger a long time and have matched cells. Once the system is balanced, the balancing system is just maintaining it
I believe Dyson batteries are the same way, have all the circuitry to balance but dont. Infact, supposedly if the cells in the dyson get unbalanced beyond 0.1v the bms bricks completely, and cant be recovered even if manually rebalanced
You could try to build a mini board that taps into the i2c pins and VCOUT. It could then listen to the comms and stealthily inject balancing commands inbetween the normal communication. You could only balance for around 400ms at a time as you need to turn off balancing before the main chip tries to read the voltages. A better solution would be to write open source firmware. Someone did this for Dyson batteries, but I don't have the time for such a feat.
@@toolscientist - if the sample circuit from the data sheet shows 47 ohm resistors, why wouldn’t putting a resistor in parallel with the 1Kohm resistors give similar behavior as in the data sheet sample circuit?
@@stevebabiak6997 it would, but the problem is software. I realise now I didn't explain it very well in the video, but the AFE can't balance on its own, it needs the MCU to tell it which cell to balance. As the MCU never tells it to balance, it will never balance, no matter what resistors are there.
@@toolscientist - have you tried to use a shunt resistor, just in case it might have an effect? I don’t own any M18 products so it’s not bothering me, but just curious because when things seem this close …
I have bought a larger printer since making this vid. I need to do a complete redesign with multi-cyclones as the performance wasn't as good as I hoped. I want to be able to vacuum a few kg of fine dust without needing to clean the filter
I'm guessing a lot of small embedded projects are just hacked at until they work sufficiently. Whoever wrote this probably left the company years ago, and no one bothers to change it for fear of breaking it. It can't be that complicated - I think an experienced embedded engineer could re-write the whole thing in a week or two (prob only a few days, followed by lots of testing)
@@toolscientist The amount of code programmed into those things can't even be that much though. Considering there's no balancing, the only useful thing any of the software seems to do is flash codes and half of that is useless. The foundation for a lot of good features is there but it's not being used properly. I reckon if they give me access to their code, I bet I can cut out all the bs, all the lazy copy paste, all the errors, and actually make it do what it's supposed to do and probably in a fraction of the size. Maybe it's worth sacrificing a battery or two and overwrite the memory on those chips. I'm a heavy Milwaukee user and I thought to myself "heh, dewalt don't even balance their batteries?" but this one got me sad.
@Nitrxgen they've also got the charger comms protocol, and I've heard there's a hidden diagnostic protocol that can pull more data. It's not going to be massive, but I'm guessing ~3k-6k lines of code. The FU-Dyson-BMS project looks around 2-3k lines (main is ~900, i2c ~750, then several 100 line files). But yeah, if someone leaked the code we could add balancing in a day. In a month we could clean it up a fair bit, add dynamic current-based low voltage cutoff, and get rid of that low-voltage bounce as well
There's no balancing at all, so speed/length of charge makes no difference. I guess it's possible that the slow charger sends a command to the battery to tell it to balance, but that seems unlikely that the slow charger would do that, but the rapid wouldn't. Ultimately it's the battery that decides to balance. The easiest time to balance would be after charging has finished.
One of the giveaways that balancing never occurs is the structure of the i2c conversations. If a balancing transistor was turned on, you couldn't measure the cell voltage due to the voltage drop across the resistors. So you'd think they would turn off balancing before measuring cell voltages, just to be sure. But the only time they touch the BAL_CTL register is after they've measured the cells.
Fascinating stuff. Do we know any tool manufacturer that does actually balance their battery? I'd love to learn more about how you do these reverse engineers.
Well, so far I'm 0/2 brands that balance their cells. Looks like I'm going to have to check all of them. It'd be funny if some cheapo brand like Aldi was the only one doing it
@@toolscientistI can try my Kobalt 6 cell batteries. What’s the best way to do that - a good voltage difference on a cell, and how many cycles should I do to see if it is actually balancing?
@@gf2e if you can see which resistors are the balancing resistors, then measure the voltage across them. Should be zero normally and ~2V when balancing. Other option is to push a cell high by around 0.1V and then leave it on the charger for a few hours. Make sure when you push the cell high that you start with all cells around 3.6V where the discharge curve is fairly linear. Also let it settle for 10min - cells tend to lose 0.05-0.2V after you remove charging current. Then you get into the problem of do they balance during or after charge. If during, then yeah, you'll need several charge cycles and measure the voltages between each, with 30min rest before measuring. Measuring the resistors will be the easier and more definitive answer.
@@toolscientist The cells just happen to be 3.6v. Clearly, a sign from above. There are six sets of NPN transistor pairs (KNM marking), with two 0402 resistors each. Not gonna be balancing with a whole lot of power on an 0402. One of the resistors is 20k, the other 100k. That is not very promising to me unless I am missing something. 180uA is kinda low. It’s only a 2Ah battery, but.
Balancing old M18 packs is such a pain. I don't even bother putting all 4 screws back in my battery cases I have to open them so often. So frustrating that Milwaukee refuses to make a charger /pack combo that actually balances the cells properly. It literally takes me an extra 15-30 minutes to do it manually...and it would be so simple & convenient to just leave the battery on the charger for an extra 15 minutes if it would just do it.
Doesn't even need a new charger. All it needs is a software update in the batteries. The 1 kOhm resistors makes me think they had problems. The Texas Instruments reference design uses 47 Ohm resistors.
@@PowerScissor What settings do you use for your supply and for how long? Also, do you use anything to stop the charging or do you just check voltage occasionally?
If you’re doing this often, I’d suggest getting a balance charger, perhaps like one from iSDT. You can add a 6 pin balance cable to all the cells. Then you can balance without disassembling it. I can’t find the charger for my black and decker battery, so I just use a balance charger.
It would be amazing if someone designed an open-source balancer for 20V Max (18V Max) and M18. I’ve been doing it manually for 20V Max batteries for years now using alligator clips to the balance leads or back-probing pins to the terminals. With a dozen DCB107 chargers around I’ve always been tempted to take one apart just to build a jig using the terminals. Taking one apart to replace the main PCB with an open-source balancing board would be even better. :)
Lot of effort to make an open-source PCB. I'd rather just mock Milwaukee until they fix their damn firmware themselves :-) Balancing jig wouldn't be too hard. I've seen people make 3D printed jigs for rebalancing Flexvolt packs, and I've seen someone add JST connectors to the M18 packs so they could balance without taking it apart.
I drilled a small hole in my black and decker battery to run a 6 pin balance cable. Now I can use my iSDT balance charger with it. Some packs such as M12 have a connector with every cell already connected. But, sadly, that doesn’t work with balance chargers because the battery pack usually has a resistor in-line. You will probably always need to add your own cable.
@@gf2e yeah, same problem with dewalt - resistors on the pins. I wonder if there's a charger out there that's really smart and can be told to ignore resistance, or really dumb and just ignores resistance anyway. Prob has to be smart, the resistors create voltage drops that would need to be accounted for when measuring the cell voltages during balance. Or you've got to turn off balancing, let the cell settle, measure, then resume balancing.
Would be very interesting to see what Bosch Professional batteries do when charging or in use. Bosch representatives claim that their tools communicate with the battery.
Bosch is high on my todo list. I'll need to hunt for a 2nd hand battery, tool, and charger, but they seem common enough. I'm sure they "communicate" in some way, but that could be similar to LXT/M18 where it's just a simple stop/go signal.
@@toolscientist They definitely not actively balanced (at least the core ones) although claimed by Bosch representatives that they do. i had to create a jig and balance them with external charger.
Perhaps it's a bug where when they check the cell voltages for imbalance, the accidentally read one of the cells twice. Assuming both batteries use the same firmware, this would cause the same cell in the pack to be unbalanced.
There could definitely be a bug, but not from checking the same cell twice. If they were balancing the wrong cell, I'd see it. Instead they're just not balancing anything. In my 12Ah pretty much all the cells are at different voltages, so even if they skipped one or even 2 cells, there would always be a cell that's at a higher voltage than the others.
The BQ battery balance chip, for those wondering, supports 50mA current through the FETs. The BQ chip does not control the FETs automatically in any mode, it relies on the MSP430 (which is quite capable of running balancing code). 50mA would deal with 25mAh of capacity imbalance over one charge of half an hour period. Idling for a day could correct one cell bank by 1200mAh. (adjacent banks can't be balanced simultaneously). The microcontroller has 32K flash, and 1K RAM. Which is comedically overspecced for what it's doing here. There is no question that they ran out of space. In principle, the battery firmware may be 100% capable of balancing if instructed or configured to by the charger, and the charger just doesn't.
They might have large code size. The 12Ah is actually using an RL78 (R5F100BDA) with 48k ROM, when the RL78 comes in 32, 24, 16, et cetera variants. So either they've written the world's most overcomplicated BMS (that doesn't balance) or for some reason the 48k chip is easier to source. But I agree that there's no way balancing was left out due to space constraints. My 31 lines and several variables can be cut down to about 8 lines and 3 variables (lowest cell voltage, highest cell voltage, highest cell index) if you only balance the highest cell. And in any case it's a trivial amount in a 32/48k system.
Another commenter just posted their new Forge 8Ah battery and it's using the same Renesas chip, but "BEA", which has 64k flash. They must be mining crypto in there! Now I see the scam: 1. Distribute batteries that mine crypto using other people's power. 2. Don't balance so the batteries fail early 3. Harvest crypto from returned batteries 4. Profit!
I've always questioned weather they are balancing properly, or at all. This really could be called industry malpractice, or at the very least, anti consumer.
Yeah, it seems Dewalt and now Milwaukee are happy as long as the battery makes it past the warranty period. I wonder how many more brands I'll find that don't balance.
Yes, I want to test them all (within reason - I'm poor, and a lot of the cheaper US and EU brands aren't available in AU). I have 5 or 6 M12 tools and 2 batteries from my own collection, so I'll do them soon.
AEG should be interesting. Pretty sure they have standalone protection with cutoff in the battery. I've seen a few of their tools with 2 pins and some with more, so they've got something extra going on. Are you in Sydney, AU?
@@toolscientistI'm very interested to know if it balances or not. I can confirm that the battery does have a low-voltage cut-off. The battery itself looks to cut off around 13.5-14 volts. Newer tools have redundant cut-offs in the tools themselves. I observed that they don't start with voltages below 12 ish volts. Also, if I recall correctly, there are different thresholds for stopping a working tool vs. starting the tool.
@@dimammxNice! I suspected they did have a cutoff because they switched from NiCd to LiIon with the same battery connection. But my only Ridgid battery and charger are NiCd so I haven’t been able to test :)
@@toolscientistif makita doesn't balance charge then their manuals (and marketing ig) are lying. Iirc they specifically mention that batteries get balanced when left on chargers after they are fully chsrged
@@KeijonAutoVuokra thanks, I'll have to look that up. I like when they make specific claims (rather than vague marketing claims), easier to test them that way. My feeling is that Makita got burnt by the poor design of their first LXT packs and went overboard after that.
Only things I can think of are that they had problems getting it to work reliably and then after a while they found that cell matching was good enough. Otherwise it's just planned obsolescence, which is risky for a pro tool brand.
@toolscientist marketing-wise, how about how balance charging takes longer, and they lose more in sales from the perception that they're less efficient and slow charging, than they lose by the long term reputation of having poor balancing or only charging to 3 bars (something that takes years to notice)? From the looks of the code, it's like they didn't know who to hire (how many EE's or Programmers on staff there to even help choose a candidate?), may never have known it never worked, because they hired an idiot. I'm really curious what Dewalt and Milwaukee's corporate response would be if approached. Once upon a time I wrote to Campbell-Hausfield about my compressor motor burning up, and I was put in charge with the literal chief of technology at the company in response. Some of these technical people just never seem to be approached and are fascinating to talk to.
True. But they could just leave it to stealthily balance at the end of charge and no one would know or care. Marketing wise you could add an "optimising" LED to the charger and convince people that it's putting extra special electrons in the batteries.
@@MattsAwesomeStuff Except balance charging really doesn't take longer. It's 2mA drain, only on imbalanced cells. If one bank only is high, for example due to low capacity, with charging taking half an hour you get back an effective 10mA due to better balance leading to whole pack rising in capacity by 5mAh over a half hour charge. The charge only takes 2 or so seconds longer in half an hour, and only as you're raising the capacity. Obviously, you could trivially also continue balancing when in a charger idle. Even if you don't want to run the balance circuitry when out of the charger.
@toolscientist well yes obviously this would be the right way to go. It's such a tiny thing to keep them from falling farther out of balance. When you and I run Milwaukee things will be different, but do you think the guy who wrote that code is A-tier material? Or was his IQ below room temperature?
As pessimistic as i sound, i would not be surprised if the code is present but disabled, as death by imbalance tends to take quite a while, its kinda like a stealth planned obsolescence to sell more batts, dyson batteries and i also suspect ryobi 36v batteries do the same
I rarely buy the planned obsolescence argument as it only takes 1 disgruntled employee to leak it and then your reputation is trashed. Consumer electronics can get away with it, but power tool brands would get savaged for doing such a thing. But yeah, I'm struggling to think of what other reason there is. Only thing I can think of is that they couldn't get it to work reliably. But then why stick with the same balancing chip for 15 years?
I suspect that they put a first year university coder to design this code and they did not understand the big picture. That was a number of years back and no one has touched the code since. And who knows, maybe they lost the source code.
That has crossed my mind. It was developed back in ~2008, then the Redlink Plus update (digital comms with charger) was in ~2013. They definitely made an update when the 6/9Ah came out as they changed from 2.0V to 2.5V low voltage cutoff. Then there was at least another update around 2021/2022 to add the LED diagnostic codes back in. So they seem to be able to make updates.
