Finally, after many sleepless nights, the Makita unlock is here! OpenBatteryInformation: github.com/mnh-jansson/open-b... Blog: martinjansson.netlify.app/pos... martinjansson.netlify.app/pos... Thanks to Romain for all the help!
This is very common in the battery industry, and for a good reason, safety. But it is also possible to repair batteries safely, so permanently locking them is just uncool :)
I'm waiting for the european union to make it mandatory for manufacturers to open their service software, and to have an universal interface to access the internal OS.. Would make so much easier to fix the problems of all those electronics we have around us every day..
Absolutely! And right to repair is definitely the way forward. How it is implemented in legislation is a very complicated task however, which i don't envy the decision makers.
Partially agree, but imagine if you were a maker of high-powered Li-ion products. Would you want users able to reset a battery that had bricked itself for safety due to misuse, such as severe overtemp, overcurrent, or overdischarge? Makita is a bit too trigger happy, though.
@@toolscientistas long as they cover themselves by a disclaimer as it's better for manufacturers and end users to be able reset the battery than open and repair it with 3rd party parts, at least it will lock again if the safety issue is still present and allows it to be repaired, like having a RCD on a consumer unit.
I've never stumbled across such a gem with so few views. Super impressive work, I don't even know where to start when it comes to deciphering a disassembled binary. I'm gonna clone your repo and give it try this week.
Hey! This showed up 5th in my recommended. Hopefully it gets some views. I haven't had the time to look at your page yet, but I'll get around to it soon. I'll post a notice in my channel. You should make a post to the Makita subreddit as well.
RU-vid just recommended this to me, and I came to the comments section to make sure @ToolScientist knew about it :) I’m going to have to wire this up and see whether my knockoff Makita batteries work with it, in terms of reading basic parameters.
If you subscribe to Tool Scientist then it was probably a community post in your feed complete with a video thumbnail that made it look like a video served up by the algorithm. ;)
Excellent job! Have you ever worked with EGO 56V batteries? They use a communication via the D-terminal and I have tried to figure it out, but have not gone as far as copying microcontroller data. I have a video on what is the D-terminal discussing the pack and where I left off. Hope your channel blows up man!
Thanks for the kind words! I've actually never heard of them, will have to take a look some time. Given the price of those batteries they definitely seem to warrant repair!
@@mnh-jansson Yeah, I have worked on them a lot on my channel and lots of good contributions from viewers as well. I just have not figured out the D-terminal communication completely. It seems to run and shutdown after about 10 secs or so if no communication between the pack and tool. So it's been a big question over the last few years for sure!
@@ThriftyToolShed Sounds very interesting! Unfortunately EGO does not seem to have alot of presence where i live. If anyone is willing to donate the BMS i could give it a shot, but given the very little information on the microcontroller it would be challanging for sure!
Great work! Well done! I worked on a similar project for Dyson vacuum batteries. Unfortunately the code was protected there, but one guy managed to find bytes in eeprom that resets the fault flags.
Thank you for your kind words. I hope to support more batteries in the future. If you have information on batteries which uses similar locking functions or batteries you would like to see be supported, please open an issue on Github
Thanks! No it's not fake 😁. I forgot to mention in the video that it does not work on all versions of the Makita batteries yet, but this will most likely change in the future once we have cracked the older batteries.
Thanks! If it uses RAJ240080 microcontroller, most likely it would work, if it is older F0513, then sadly no. I've spent countless hours trying to get F0513 working but there is no real unlock command in these. There is still a possiblity to use a bootloader function to reporgram the microcontroller to get it working again, but reverse engineering this bootloader is very time consuming and very hard to get working with the actual hardware.
This really depends. Simply reactivating the BMS would not cause much issue in case of an actual fault as we don't disable the security functions, we simply clear the error flags. I hope to implement features in the tool and provide information on how to safely recover the battery packs in the future. It's been so much work to get to this stage so i simply wanted to release the work now when i finally have a working MVP.
I have three batteries that were emptied while warm but left in a cold shed before trying to charge them. This dropped the voltage below the threshold and the charge failed and set the fault state. Once the battery warms up the voltage is in a safe range, and I checked that the cells are still balanced properly. It's not all faults that are ignorable, but for this type of fault there is no danger to resetting and trying again.
Wow, good catch! Did not think anyone would notice to be honest 😅. But the reason is that i transplanted a spare BMS i had into this battery. I also had to trigger a fault just to have a battery to demonstrate on.
@@danikvideos I desoldered one of the balancing legs and then put the battery on the charger. This would also blow the fuses, but i had them bypassed already.
I'm still working on the F0513. RAJ and MAK are known working. The F0513 are actually not unlockable by commands, but there is a bootloader that is accessible through the connector interface which should make it possible to unlock by reflashing. Hope to release this soon.
