[ltp] Almost dead battery

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 04:55:18AM +0000, Bret Waldow wrote:

> I think it's generally called "battery refill".
> An Internet search for "laptop battery refill" turns up a small number
> of candidates.
...
> IIUC the problem is a mix of various problems:
> 
> - It's a dying market (with batteries getting less and less standard and
>   harder and harder to take out and replace).
> - It was not cost-competitive: lots of expensive (and somewhat
>   dangerous) manual work by skilled individuals.
> - It was not reliable: apparently in many cases the battery's charging
>   controller IC refused to work with the new cells.
> - It was based on "send your battery and we'll return it refilled" which
>   means spending several days without your battery.
>   In practice that meant that I first bought a second battery and only
>   when that second battery seemed to get near its end of life did
>   I send my first for a refill.  Of all the users of laptops, there are
>   sadly few who keep them long enough to need a third battery.

Good points, but ...

The problem is scale; a local shop and a reprocessing
wait are indeed not practical.  A regional or global 
operation would send a full-price replacement, and offer
a hefty rebate if the worn-out battery was sent back for
refurbishment, to sell to a subsequent customer. 

Perhaps a local "shop" operation would be a useful 
interface, but COVID e-shopping built a huge package
supply chain that works quickly under normal loads. 
I ordered some motherboards, RAM, and CPU fans from vendors
across the US on last Thursday, got them all Monday.  They
are already "Ubuntu"ed and deployed in 10 year old cases. 
Laptop batteries are a different but simpler challenge.

I could help seed the process with twenty failed T60 and
T30 batteries.  Thousands of us worldwide can do likewise.
99.9999% of us aren't capable of organizing this - that
leaves only 7,000 clever people worldwide who might be.

This would only work for "high popularity" models like the
T3x and T6x Thinkpads; the goal is to recover and reuse the
plastics and the PC board (and the fig-leaf of the original
safety licensing). 

The operation would need to be of sufficient scale to pay
for custom runs of circuit boards, replacement plastics,
and even custom runs of battery cells.  Engineering skills,
not a local shop.  The regional operations might be
domestic (in many countries), with engineering oversight
from Asia.  A reputable global brand (or brands), not a
back-room operation.

The rebuilt batteries should have more "smarts", telling 
the user to order a replacement before it actually fails.
Partly for the user, mostly for operations scheduling.

That said, perhaps the goal can also be accomplished with
a few generic designs and 3D-printed plastic "shims" for
he laptop interface.  Perhaps not the original form factor,
but a way to provide SOME kind of portable power for our
beloved old Thinkpads, and beloved models from other
manufacturers (if there are any such, my balky old Dells
have all been scrapped and recycled).

This could promote hacking and redesign, new smarts (and
back-lights) for our beloved old Thinkpads.  I correspond
with an EE student in Singapore who is designing a modern
main-board replacement for our cherished T60 laptops. 
No guarantee of results, but training young entrepreneurs
is also important.

I have a dozen spare T60s (ranging from 1024x768 to
2048x1536), and a dozen more replacement keyboards. 
Enough to last me for life, but sadly not enough long-lived
batteries.  I'm using a screen-hacked T60 to write this. 
The modern flat-low-travel-key touchpad Thinkpads with the
vertically-crippled screens don't match the documents I
write and the images I create with my jittery aging hands.

Keith L.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com