Dyson battery lifespan reduced by design and difficult to repair

Incident

Dyson battery packs contain a Battery Management System (BMS) with a chip that would be capable of balancing the individual cells. However, the manufacturer has decided to leave away a few inexpensive but essential resistors, resulting in no balancing to take effect. As a result, the battery pack wears out much quicker than it should. ^[1]

Even if one charges (using a third-party charger) and balances, or even replaces the individual cells, the Battery Management System will still not allow you to charge the battery because its firmware writes 2 bytes into the configuration memory of the microcontroller that essentially bricks the battery pack.

Impact on consumers

This incident makes the lifespan of the dyson products battery packs significally shorter, forcing people to replace the them more often.

Affected product lines

Potentially all product lines newer than V6 are affected by this issue, although more information is required to confirm this.

V6 and V7 models.^[2]
V10 and V11 models.^[3]

Workarounds

Open source firmware has been written to un-brick the battery pack by overwriting the board firmware for some models using a 3.3V Arduino board.^[4]^[5]^[6]

References

[1] ttps://hackaday.com/2022/05/23/fighting-back-against-dodgy-dyson-batteries/

[2] ttps://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS?tab=readme-ov-file#compatible-vacuumsbatteries

[3] ttps://github.com/davidmpye/V10_Dyson_BMS

[4] ttps://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS

[5] ttps://github.com/davidmpye/V10_Dyson_BMS

[6] ttps://github.com/kumdzio/PIC16LF1847arduino-programmer

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