Smart Battery Hacking Progress!

I finally made some progress on reading out data using the “smart battery” interface on laptop battery packs. I’ve succeeded in pulling a number of useful numerical values from three different MacBook Pro batteries from two different manufacturers and one Acer battery pack. I have, so far, failed to get anything out of a different model of Acer pack, an ASUS pack, and an HP pack, but I have some ideas about what to try next. I also have to do more work to make sense of a few of the values I’m getting, and figure out how to read out string data, and figure out if I can get at voltages for individual parallel banks of cells.

In the meantime, here is what I got out of an old Mac battery:

NuPower
Design Capacity (mAh): 5800
Design Voltage: 10800
Manufacture Date: 15400
Cycle Count: 531
Voltage: 12.23
Full Charge Capacity (mAh): 3073
Remaining Capacity (mAh): 2812
Relative Charge PCT: 92
Absolute Charge: 48
Temp: 31.85
Current (mA): 0
Minutes remaining for full charge: -1

4 thoughts on “Smart Battery Hacking Progress!”

  1. HP ,Asus battery, some of them need input passwords to get in it, if no passwords,then you failed to get anything out of them,you can’t make it work on laptop even you recell it new.

  2. Ellen, unlike some people, my main interest in using the smart battery is to extract information about the origin and history of the pack so I can estimate the health of the cells inside without having to open the pack. I don’t plan on recelling packs or changing any of the values.

    Do I need a password just to read out values from HP packs? I’ve been able to get data out of Asus packs without one, but I’m still having trouble with HP. I think I may need to put the battery into the right operating mode, or something.

  3. Thanks. Unfortunately I don’t have the hardware that SBWorkshop requires to talk to the pack. If I can’t figure out why the HP packs aren’t responding I may have to scrounge up the hardware and use a logic analyzer to see how it is communicating.

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