Month: May 2015

Safety third!

Posted in B work, Electronics, Reverse Engineering - May 27, 2015 - 0 Comment

Say what you will about globalization and the downfall of the USA, I still like ordering stuff from China. It’s cheap, and it takes so long to get here that I forget I ordered it, so it’s a surprise to me.

Recently, I got a bunch of li-poly battery monitors. These (not surprisingly) monitor li-poly batteries and sound an alarm when the battery voltage gets too low. Overdischarging a li-poly battery can damage the battery fairly quickly, and so may mean you have to buy a new battery. This is far better than overcharging them, which can start a pretty dramatic chemical fire.

The monitors I got are these or something very like them. The ones I have have a button which you can press to set the alarm voltage, with a default of 3.3V/cell.

Like a good hacker, I immediately opened one of them up. It has two ICs, one of which is a Atmel 24C02BN, which is a 2kbit I2C EEPROM. The other is unmarked. I had high hopes that it would be an Atmel part as well, or at least marked, so that I could possibly reflash it with my own firmware.

Having 16 pins counts it out from being any of the ATTiny or ATMega series, as well as any of the 8, 16, or 32-bit PICs. I imagine it’s something like an Elan microcontroller, and probably not super-well documented.

I did also find out that the speakers are simple dumb speakers, not beepers, so the micro generates the audio waveform for them. That means if I want to use the beep as a shut-off signal, I’ll have to do a little filtering, or add a 555 as a pulse stretcher.