IronOS VS smbusb

So apparently the Pinecil is a BLE-enabled soldering iron with a 108 MHz RISC-V processor running a custom real-time operating system [0]. The author wanted to access the UART logs, so they repurposed a Raspberry Pi Pico (a dual-core microcontroller system running a real-time OS) for the task.

That's a staggering amount of hardware, sortware and computing power devoted to decoding one of the simplest and oldest serial protocols from a device whose sole purpose is to essentially melt tin. Maybe I'm out of touch, but I think I'll stick to my thermostat-controlled Weller soldering station and FTDI UART converters. I apologize if this post comes across as snarky, my point is that these are solved problems and have been for half a century.

[0] https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS

I got a TS101 and wanted to switch to IronOS straight away as it seems like an improvement to stock firmware. On the website it says that TS101s are supported, but there is no file for it. I figured it must be the TS100 .hex file, but flashing it just gives me an error (a .NOT file). Is the TS101 really supported and how do I flash the firmware in that case?

but the pinecil can also use IronOS https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS

Look at this ticket in Ralim's IronOS, all 4 people same issue and all they had to do was clean their Cartridges with IPA 90-99% Alcohol. https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS/issues/1601

I'm very happy with the Pinecil. The $25 price is very reasonable for a reliable soldering iron that is open source hardware[1] and runs on free and open source firmware.[2]

[1] Schematics: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinecil:_How_to_Repair#Schemati...

[2] IronOS: https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS

Also, I'm not sure what exactly is happening with the OS on the irons, because I thought the pinecils shipped with IronOS but it may be an old or cut down version because when I loaded the latest https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS on my pinecils I just ordered two weeks ago, I definitely got a ton of options I didn't have before.

On any BMS there will be a chip, sometimes 2, which are the brains of the operation. The TI bq-series are pretty common. Some of these have public documentation, some are private. A lot of them are password-protected if you want to overwrite the original programming. There are various tools for interacting with them, from free open source to paid You don't always need to reset it, sometimes just replacing the cells then shorting across the switching side of the output is enough. But without knowing what you're getting into it's a gamble.

Sorry, Vantage is Lenovo software, but it has a function to improve battery gauge accuracy. It made more sense when mentioned in the Thinkpad forum, but I figured I'd crosspost my request here too. That being said they of course did the major dick move of only ever adjusting measured capacity down, even if the cells were literally at 4.1V when the battery said it had run out. Therefore, I first used the smbusb utility to edit the dynamic battery data and blank out the battery full charge capacity (which actually sets it to the absolutely ridiculous 65535Wh). After that when running the gauge reset in Vantage the battery was more than happy to report a more realistic 102.78Wh of actual capacity, despite still reporting a design capacity of only 93.6Wh which thankfully didn't raise any issue. Unfortunately while trying to experiment with the BMS firmware further to try and adjust the voltage thresholds to better fit the new cells, I corrupted something. The BMS still reports and sort of works but whenever I try to make further edits to the firmware I am greeted with errors.

I've been playing around with my failing LGC 70++ 9-cell battery after re-celling it with SANYO 3500mAh cells. Had some great success with a tool called smbusb (got the battery to report as 105WH after a gauge reset in Vantage) but I think I killed the BMS eventually by flashing some wrong values and corrupting the firmware and can't seem to get it back. I've looked around eBay but most of the batteries on there are either for T410/T420 (yes I know you can make them work in T430, but they might use a different BMS chip) or ridiculously expensive for 10-year old batteries. So here I am hoping that someone here has an old, damaged, dead or unloved battery that I can take off their hands.

You can use SMBusb and something like an FX2LP. Then to connect it, I would just use some normal Dupont 0.1 connectors (make sure they have female -> male), or of course any piece of wire if you don't mind spending more time trying fiddling about.

See HERE for a device that lets you connect to the data pins on laptop packs and read info from them. Some packs you can find pinouts online, others you have to figure out yourself.