Testing laptop battery: pinout, SMBus, charge capacity

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Testing laptop battery: pinout, SMBus, charge capacity @ KuzyaTech.

As a result of visiting Hamfest, I ended up with a laptop to take apart – a fairly new Toshiba Satellite C675D with a broken screen. It’s not a Hamfest if you don’t bring home something to take apart of course! Today we’ll be testing the battery it came with to see if it’s salvageable.The date code says  it was made in 11/2011.

Neat! Never thought of using a SMBus reader to salvage an old laptop battery. You could probably use an Arduino or Bus pirate instead of the TI eval adapter.


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1 Comment

  1. Hey, thanks for posting my ramblings! Yes you could use pretty much anything that talks I2C, including Bus Pirate, though you’d have to massage data a bit to get at SMBus fields. The beauty of Ti tools they are all battery specific, so they are good for lazy people like myself.

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