An (Unofficial) Firmware Upgrade for Dyson V6/V7 Vacuum Battery Management System
tinfever on GitHub and YouTube has released detailed instructions on replacing the firmware on a Dyson V6 or V7 vacuum which overcomes some issues with the stock firmware.
Dyson vacuum batteries are designed to fail.
Here’s why:
Series battery cells in a battery pack inevitably become imbalanced. This is extremely common and why cell balancing was invented.
Dyson uses a very nice ISL94208 battery management IC that includes cell balancing. It only requires 6 resistors that cost $0.00371 each, or 2.2 cents in total for six.
Dyson did not install these resistors. (They even designed the V6 board, PCB 61462, to support them. They just left them out.)
Rather than letting an unbalanced pack naturally result in lower usable capacity, when the cells go moderately (300mV) out of balance (by design, see step 3) Dyson programmed the battery to stop working…permanently. It will give you the 32 red blinks of death and will not charge or discharge again. It could not be fixed. Until now.
Why you would want this
You want to vacuum your apartment but your cells became slightly out of balance because you left the vacuum off the charger for too long and now your vacuum doesn’t work (ask me how I know)
You want to replace a bad cell in your battery pack
You want to understand what your battery is doing and why.
You don’t like feeling like a cash cow being squeezed for all you’re worth.
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