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. The manufacturer, however, has decided to leave out 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 a user charges (using a third-party charger) and balances the individual cells of a battery pack, or even replaces them, the BMS will still not allow the battery to be charged, 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 battery packs of Dyson products significally shorter, forcing people to replace 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

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]