Trying to REVIVE Faulty Nintendo Switch Batteries 

You should get a work bench Vince..Lol

One quick note with those TP4056 module boards, they're typically configured for a charging current of 1 amp. You generally shouldn't exceed a charge current equal to the battery's capacity (usually referred to as 1C, meaning 1x capacity). For potentially damaged batteries you should aim a bit lower. In the case of Switch batteries (supposedly 4310mAh) this setup is fine, as the module will only charge it at about 0.23C. For lower capacity batteries, you MUST make sure to modify the module appropriately by replacing the current set resistor (there are several tutorials online), or find a similar module with adjustable current.

Very very interesting. This should def have a revisit. I would say there is corrosion under that chip. I know you can buy ceramic scissors so you can cut the area of the chip out and then maybe remove the chip with heat away from the cells (just to confirm). Must be able to purchase those chips from somewhere. All batteries are showing good cells now. The last battery did charge back up. Maybe there is some safety device on that board that can be reset or something. Great job Vince

Nice little video. Some things to point out: - Around 27:16 there still seems to be some corrosion on Q1. Q1 is a transistor that likely controls the output of the negative terminal of the battery to the console. Likely, why you see a drop in voltage after cleaning, is corrosion is conductive (and thus why cleaning it off can help in some circumstances) and there was probably some voltage "leaking" through the corrosion to the other contact of the transistor (remember, transistors are somewhat like a switch, in their off state they stop electricity from passing, and in their on state, they allow electricity to pass), once you cleared most of this corrosion, not as much could leak through. Likely why you do see what you do is because of the corrosion not being fully cleared. It's also possible that the control chip was fried and wasn't properly driving Q1, and thus left it in a weird state and clearing some of the corrosion helped, but didn't fully cure it. - those components are small enough you could probably solder them with an iron. To get them off, heat some parts of the component, and leave the heat for a bit. It should wick through the entire part and eventually melt the solder on the other side of the component. Replacing them should be a bit easier, just solder the sides one at a time. - indeed "th" stands for "thermal" and will let the Switch motherboard or whatever other external device it's connected to know that this battery isn't OK. This is likely here in the event that Q1 fails in a shorted (on) state and is allowing current to get to the battery even when it shouldn't be. If the Switch detects this, it will stop delivering or pulling any sort of power from the battery so that it doesn't get into thermal runaway and explode/catch fire.

Great video Vince.

Hi Vince can you tell me where can I get one of those blue Matt's from. Love watching your videos. Thanks

Are the batterys one or two cells. Are both red wires connected together. Or the black wires.. nice video I like it

I believe the module you have already has cell protection. The charge only modules have "battery out only" this one has battery and output If that is the case you could remove the built in circuit protection and use the cell via the module. Not for switch but as li-on battery even in parallel with others(balance all cells before solder them together)

More info here www.electrodragon.com/product/tp4056-lithium-battery-charging-board-1a/ The grey pin is probably to a thermister / protection circuit inside the battery that would halt charging if the battery starts to overheat.

What are the grey cables for on the switch and switch lite batteries?

should you buy new batteries instead of trying to revive the old one, isn't that dangerous???

That battery controller might have took a dump or got corrosion under.

Need some merch Vince. I'd buy a t-shirt saying... "I'm gonna grab some IPA!"

The chip in some of these packs has a memory - once it detects a bad battery it stops it from being charged. To reset it you can disconnect it from the battery fully (ie remove the circuit board from the battery) Somehow the chip takes up to an hour of being disconnected from the battery for the chip to clear itself (internal capacitors?) There is expensive software to reset it, and some people buy a new fresh chip - but leaving disconnected for an hour does the job as long as the battery part is ok enough to not flag as bad again.

That's about as far as I've gotten on Switch batteries too. I've got some ideas on how to do repairs on that board though...I might make a video about it at some point.

Q1 is a FET, usually an N-channel FET, which is used to cut off the battery if the charge goes too low. RS1 is a current-measuring shunt that's used to cut off the battery if too much current is being drawn. U1 is probably a lithium cell supervisor chip, which drives Q1 and probably also sends a signal out on the grey wire to tell the console what's up with the battery.

Where is your Fire extinguisher??!! You should really get a work bench by now Vince

Time to go grab yourself a cleaned out Fray Benton Pie Dish and make it explosion proof.

While charging, you should measure the voltage on the battery terminal, not on the connector.

The battery's themselves are completely fine, its just the protection board, so what you can do is snip of the connectors as close to the protection board connection as you can, since they are spot welded, only way to remove them is by snipping them off, then if you can get a replacement nitendo switch protection board solder (use a lot of flux so the solder sticks to the nickel plates as easy as possible, since you want the battery to get the least eat possible) a bit of wire from the battery connection to the board and some captain tape on top, if you can't get the protection board still snip the battery of the board and solder some connectors onto it (xt60, deans, jst, whatever just some cmon battery connector, so you can charge it) so that way you have some lipo batteries, because they always handy, no need to throw away perfectly good batteries! (just don't forget this way they will not have protection circuit so leaving them in storage charge (3.85V) will be the best or buying a generic protection board on ebay and using that instead)

Regarding those bare wires from the aftermarket charger. Could always solder a connector to it, for safety and ease of use. Could also make multiple connections that could be plugged in for the various batteries that you would be charging

Always know where your explosion proof pie tin is (bigclivedotcom)

That q1 chip does appear to still have blue corrosion under it on the far end Vince.

WHERE IS YOU EXPLOSION CONTAINMENT PIE DISH?!?

I would not charge them on a flat surface, use a metal pot or something like that, which you can then put on top of the tile. If they start venting they can go flying off in a random direction and the gas that vents is combustible and gets very hot. It's probably a very rare occurrence, but at least when you're trying to revive a possibly water damaged battery I would be vary, since it could have been shorted before and started having its chemistry break down. Also, this would be a lot easier if you soldered the wires to a battery terminal, which you can probably find online if you don't have any spares to take from faulty boards. And if you want to use it for other things than just Switch batteries, you can even solder on a barrel jack, and solder on the corresponding opposite jack to a piece of wire that has the battery connector you want for each one, so you can easily swap them out.

I think that you do someting wrong. The circuit of the battery is a theire to protect the battery and you'r using the protecting outputs of you battery reviver, so even if it tries to charge the battery, the original circuit is protecting by disabling charging because it have very low voltage. i think that your battery reviver have two diffrent outputs to charge for a reason, first one not protected to connect it directly to the original battery connector(charging just like a swith would do), and the secound one to use it to revive the battery from insade (plus and minus terminals) (in case the original protecting circuit is cutting charging to protect the battery).

Great video =D The problem with that charger is its almost the same as the way the Switch charges it. ie. with protection to stop charging if it thinks the battery is full (or if the battery is too low). This is why I often use a bench PSU set to just a few volts, charge for a minute or so like that (limted to 1amp max), then switch over to either the switch charger or that PCB charge circuit. You might then find it starts to charge. EDIT: That said, after watching as you progressed there - the problem on both of the ones not charging is clearly bad connections (or fault) on that little IC =/ But seeing the corrosion inside the battery pack - that will be why it's not charging lol =D Glad you didn't hot air the small PCB there! These batteries are more explosive / fire risk if they have more voltage, so at 3.6v it's too high risk. You could drain the battery with a resistor for a number of hours, then perhaps use the normal soldering iron to reflow what you can, but hot air would be too high risk imo. I wonder if these could be made to work if the small IC was reflowed - I don't think you should do this as things stand as I cannot see a safe way to reflow it without heat reaching the battery. The contacts look to have been spot welded on there I think with high current. You would have to cut the PCB connections off, but then there's a risk on how to you reconnect them safely. I have a few ideas but I don't want suggest anything that might cause an accident. If it was me I would be wearing eye protection whilst working on these batteries too. Just incase it does explode...

If you're really feeling adventurous. The water damaged cell has bad battery protection with potentially good cells. The dead cells have a good battery protection board. Get where I'm going?

In my case for reviving batteries what I do is just solder the usb charging module directly to de cell, so it gets to a working voltage, making the ic to recognize it Hope it helps in some way!

To remove the battery easily, grab yourself some Dental Floss and some Goo Gone, put a lit bit of the goo gone on your dental floss then get the floss under a corner of the battery, and slowly saw your way through the adhesive underneath. If you need a better explanation shoot me a message for more in depth.

hi

If you're interested in this sort of thing, Big Clive has done a bunch of lithium battery teardowns.

google numbers of that chip and see if they can be bought, if so then just put cpu heatsink on top of battery and replace chip, it should not be a problem, before exploding or catching fire lion batteries start to swell up or heat up so you will see if its dangerous

Does nintendo swich can work without battery while connected to power supply ?

Vince, can you not get the battery connector from a dead motherboard and solder the usb charger to it rather than mess around trying to put the wires in the connector of the batter? Also maybe try doing both + and both - together or something?

@23:36 is a thermal cutoff fuse

You should get yourself a lipo charge bag, they’re only a couple of quid.

That wire looks suspiciously like Krone cab jumper wire Vince 😉

Couple of things Vince, the TP4056 charger boards have no reverse polarity protection, so if you connect up the battery the wrong way it blows the board, watch out for that. As a safety feature I would connected a "Digital Thermostat Temperature Temp Controller Switch Sensor", a couple of quid of eBay, tape the sensor to the battery, you can then set the cut off temperature so if it starts getting hot the controller switches off the charger.

Maybe you could try and find out exactly HOW these battery pads are attached to the circuit board. If they're just soldered on/through, I think you could use either your copper braid or your solder sucker to remove them. You could test by tapping your soldering iron on the dots for a while... If that's the case, do one side at a time. When all the solder is gone, pull it off, wrap it in non-conducting material (like maybe tape? that Capton Tape could work), and begin work on the next.

The board connected to the battery is protection circuit and it is spot welded to the tabs of the battery.

Hi what happened to your eBay shop? Are you still selling cables and stuff

Use an old debit card to take the battery out slide it under

After watching your videos I went & bought 2 Switch's off ebay as they were part of a job lot & going cheapish (£100), both apprently had faulty usb c ports but power on. One is in poor condition & not as per photos but weirdly seems to work fine so far. The other is in really good condition but the battery is dead & wont charge but powers up with the other one's battery. Going to try a few things before pulling the battery out. I seem to remember having a drone battery charger somewhere that's infinitely programmable and very good a reviving drone batteries so will have play around with that and see if I can hook it up and force some juice in to the Switch battery to wake it up. At worst I can at least swap the case & screen over from the working one to end up with at least one decent condition working Switch and the other just requiring a new battery. Eitherway thanks for these vids and inspiring me.

HC77AY-1 is a thermal cutoff.

This can’t go wrong, after all you’ve got so many to test on, ahem... but remember he’s no professional “apparently” even though I’d say he’s actually pretty intelligent in these scenarios, gimme his equipment and we’d be like brothers!

Those switch batteries need new Resistors at r1 and r2..

The lights are showing on your camera..

Hey Vince try to use a digital Charger like it was used for rc- batterys. You can select the target voltage and mah then you are able to select the mode like discharging an charging. It also shows the current voltage. It is although able to charge completly death batterys. I revived around 3 Nexus 7 lithium battery with this thing. From HTRC these Chargers cost around 60$

Why are you still doing this on the floor get a table already

That white stripe glue with a triangle side is meant to be pulled... it's the same as for many smartphones...

vince, my mate. you have to get power supply, and simply inject nominal voltage to pins, and keep it under 1A, wait of it to charge like 10 secconds, and then that battery will be ready to charge again with switch. What happens is that battery circuitry disables charging, and you need to boost it up to get it to work again.

Vince, dose your wife know that you got her hairdryer for your experiments.

Please don't try to rivive dead li ion batteries, they don't allow to be charged back under 2.5v for a reason. Even if you revive 30 of them, there can be one faulty that will blow up.

I just found this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gRt0Ldk66D0.html Maybe this could help to fix some switches

Hi friend, that glass might not be protection enough, usually they pouf into flames, outside is actually the recommended area. That charger is commonly limited to 1Amp maximum current output, and that might be quite danger to start a charging on a faulty battery, that's why it is recommended to use a lab power supply instead, so you can limit the voltage up to 4v1 and you start to increase the current slowly (but never higher than the maximum rated current). About the protection on this charging module it's just: reverse polarity protection (those bottom chips destroy themselves), over voltage and low voltage protection, nothing too fancy and it doesn't protect against current, current is limited by a configurable resistor that gives some feedback to the charging chip. Btw, you should test the battery (back inside the equipment) only when its voltage is above 3.7V, which is its common nominal voltage. Maximum voltage on lipo batteries are usually 4.2 (depending on the battery). The blinking led means a bad connection to the battery, it's not a feature it's actually a miss reading. You can not use hot air to replace IC's on the batteries because they have thermal fuses which would end up being blown. On the other hand, you might be able to remove the board from the battery itself and swap it with a working one, by soldering it with a soldering iron on the nickel strips. But this depends, in some boards, when no power exists anymore, they stop working because they have a memory which vanishes itself when no voltage is present.

Mini USB :(

I know this is an old video, but it is important to realize that if Lithium batteries DO catch fire, the fire releases a good deal of toxic gas (I've had it happen to me) so if you have a Lithium battery fire indoors, you MUST quickly move the burning battery outdoors or into an environment with an extraction fan. You should really only work on these batteries under a fume hood or outdoors. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just want to warn you because while the batteries label warns about fire or explosion, there is no mention of the noxious gas that the fires produce. Please be aware of this. Thank you for all of your entertaining and informative videos.

It could be you've burned the charger chip. You constantly shorted the leads of the charger. Sorry, I stop watching at 15minutes. Maybe you'll find it out later. Love your videos tho. Very entertaining. It would be great if you'd buy an arduino kit to learn a bit more. I've made a simple video about it. Click my face to see. You'll learn a lot more about the details of electronics. But you do a great job trying to find solutions. Cheers. NicoD

Vince, please, if you are going to manipulate dangerous goods, take at least the minimum safety measures: wear a mask, safety glasses and gloves. Lithium is very dangerous, if you do a short you can get blind by the explosion, the smoke can damage severely your lungs and it can burn your hands. Really, it's not worth to try to service batteries, but if you're going to do it anyway, do it safely.

Dead lipos won't accept a charge (won't draw much or any charge current) this causes momentary full charge voltage making the charger think it's fully charged but when disconnected the cell voltage drops back to where it was before. Bottom line is, if a lipo cell isn't drawing current during charging its toast. Also lithium batteries get permanently damaged when discharged below I believe 1.8 volts.

goodbye bedtime

I think i see corrosion under the q1 chip on yhe first battery that you opened up

Vince what does the gray wire do?

Pull the battery plug from a bad board

Hi I haven’t had a good day

Go to Poundland and buy a lithium battery pack and get the board from there and replace it with one of the broken boards.

aluminum connectors separate from the board .. after fixing bored ..spot weld with 24 V battery High amps with 2 small nails to re-weld spot welding done cheap 👍

2.40 pounds for the tp4056 charger isn’t next to nothing, it’s next to 2 pounds. Jk, But really they should only cost about a quarter from China, but that’s a long wait usually

that tp4056 board can charge up a cell directly you just have to connect + and minus over the board tha's got water damage is a battery protection board that prevents nasty things going into the battery and you can in fact get them off eBay there's however a string possibility that: a) don't fit b) haven't got the proper protocol the switch requires to sense a good battery keey doing these investigatative videos, they's fun to watch, they remind me dois this same thing 20 years ago! Chers!

IPA or Acetone works quite well for glued in batteries.

There should be a IC for the protection of the battery from over discharge or over charge in the form of a DW01 or similar IC. Google “DW01 schematic” to find out more. Usually when the protection circuit dies then no current will get into the battery cells. That protection IC might not be allowing current out of the cells on that first battery.

I believe I've got a similar issue. Would applying heat help to "reactivate" the battery and allow charging? I found an explanation about it on imore but... Also, ou mentioned during the video that leaving the charger doing its thing over time would probably activate the battery, would that work just leaving the switch charging for a day or two? By the way, great content. Thank you

Nice work :-)

The out terminals is enabling the battery let's say you have a motor you want to power on from the lithium battery you connect possitive and negative from the motor to the out terminal and the battery B+ and B- so that way you make a rechargeable project or you can just make only batteries charging stations with those tp modules

And another thing, the built in protection chip in the battery (most lipos have them, but not all) might also be refusing the charge if the voltage gets too low. In that case there's not much you can do, unless you fancy peeling back the outer casing to solder wires directly onto the internal battery terminals. But you risk shorting something and causing a thermal runaway if you do that.

Get a cheap USB charge circuit with step-up to 5v and just use the cells for a switch power bank. Maybe dremnel a broken switch case to contain them? Would be a great addition to your other custom switch builds.

its mandatory an official charger to wake up a NS that was a battery depleted? (now charged /~4.2v but with a phone charger, still no wake up)

Mate, I love your videos but please get a desk

This would be a good time to use some kapton tape to hold the wires down.

Clicked so fast my screen cracked

4.1VDC-4.2VDC is roughly the full charge of a single cell lipo battery so it makes sense that a charger is going to stop charging.

Hey Vince you still using that 853d rework station? Pretty sure thats what you said you had. Long time sub here do a lot of tinkering want to get into the repairs a bit more. I kinda killed my 862d today. Since I'm stuck buying a new one figured need a power supply anyhow. I used some resistance wire for a vape to patch it for a temp fix. It could last 6 months could last 6 hours as we know lol. So just gonna spend a bit and get a rework station with the 3 in one i guess it would be. Was hoping you may do a updated video on the station how you like it and stuff like that.

I have one Samsung phone battery, the poly fuse gone bad, it does have voltage across the pcb board terminal, but when it have a light load like draw 100ma, it will break connection. End up I just short the fuse away and it worked.

on the TP4056 the red light means it is charging and the blue means it is charged.

These lithium batteries have a built-in charge controller, this means they are protected for overvoltage and prevent them to get damage for to lower voltages. This module that you have, is designed for batteries that don't have this protection circuits, So if you wanna remove the original board from the battery and replace with this module you can do it without problems. But you probably cannot use in Nintendo switches anymore, but you gonna have a nice battery to use anywhere.

Get out of my head Vince! I literally just bought some of these the other day for a Gameboy DMG I'm working on, to power it with a mobile phone 3.7v battery. Then I figured I'd open my old dead laptop batteries and recharge those cells too. You're copying meeeeee. Realistically though, you're better at this than me.

Red is chang and green or blue is fully charged.

That's 2 2000 miliamp hour lithium ion batteries stacked on top of each other in parallel to increase the capacity. The little metal tabs are like wires but they don't need as much space inside (I took apart a official genuine SONY psp 1200 mah battery [for the 2000/3000 series psp systems] and it had those too). Also DO NOT touch anything in there/clean it with the batteries connected or it could be dangerous

What is max voltage of this battery when full? When I have charged it to 4.2v it is showing only about 50%🙃

Could you make a video on changing colours of consoles etc, not just re brite but re colour so systems match, e.g white speakers with red turntable changed to both black..?

One of the tricks to reviving batteries is pluging it in and out for about 20-30 times with one to two second charging cycles. I revived so many discharged GBA SP batteries that way. Crude, but efficient. Only thing to note is that you need to disconnect the charging wires, not the charger itself (the remaining charge in capacitors mess up the procedure), if you do this often enough it's useful to just hook up a power switch to the wires. You can see that charging light lasting ever so slightly longer each time and then it just stays on and charges up normally.

when I revive lithium cells I always bypass the protection circuit and charge using the cells + and - terminals, then reconnect afterwards once I know the cell is good and can charge properly. I use a Turnigy charger that I use for various rc models so I can set the voltage and charge current.

Brilliant my mate Vince as always didn't expect to see another video up just yet but when I sat down it was a lovely surprize to see u had another vid ready. Really made my night getting to watch that fantastic mate. Be careful as it's lithium batterys button give up I'm sure u will be able to fix them. I've got faith u can do it. :)

The nice thing about LIPOs is that if they are going to get "pissy" about being charged, they tend to puff up and that disconnects the plates and prevents it from going any further. The reason 18560 and that sort of lithium ion battery explode is because they are inside a tin can and the plates stay in touch and get hotter and higher pressure until the bang and flames. You do not want the cell to go above 4.2v (and the TP4056 is designed to do that). So the way a lithium recharges is that you initially want to charge at a constant current and when it starts getting near the 4.2v it changes to constant voltage and decreasing current till it hits 4.2 and it shuts off.

That IS the best way to charge a single lipo cell if it is not being charged by the original method. I have ordered a lot of those in case I am building something that uses a single lithium cell. And it is good for over charge and over discharge protection

Finished up the video and overall good job not blowing anything up. You're really showing a lot of growth in your electronics skills. I think that battery might be welded to those tabs making it more fun to disconnect. If you do solder with the battery connected, try to map out the traces so you know whether you're going to short the cells + to -. Bad things can follow. Good luck buddy and keep on improving.

Why dont you open the good one so that you can get an idea of the readings of a good batteries components. That way you can reference against the bad ones and really pinpoint the issue more.

It was coming through on the camera fine Vince

vince bro use your iron on the batterys + & - connection on 400 ° and use some flux on there it will splict just like nothing.on the battery circit board check some fuse in there sometimes fuse may be cut because water damage.love your video bro keep up the good work god bless you.