This is a cool project, and I love it when somebody "takes back" their hardware a little bit or keeps them useful through hacking instead of throwing it away.
But it shows how irrationally our society is set up in some aspects. In an ideal world, you could just send the Lenovo engineer a mail and ask for the firmware source. But the incentives are such that they keep it secret, probably because they make a lot of money with batteries. So hackers spend a lot of time reverse engineering stuff. It seems really inefficient.
I just received my developer beta MNT Reform, and I've been really enjoying it. They keyboard takes a bit of getting used to, but everything's very cute.
What is irrational? These batteries have been cloned cheaply so they're already reverse engineered. You can find them all over eBay.
If this works on the T430 and x230 it will be very impressive.
I don't think this generation had DRM on the batteries. The new ones did and they're not cracked.
DRM on batteries of expensive electronics seems consumer-friendly to me. Most consumers' experience with battery replacement would be sending it for replacement by a technician. Battery DRM would make it difficult for the consumer to end up with an unsafe battery in their device and pockets.
It's no different if you replace it yourself, that's tangential to my point. You'd be sourcing a specialized replacement battery online and there's a risk that the battery you get is an unsafe knockoff.
I've also been able to buy non-knock off batteries for just about all electronics up to a few years ago when companies decided that soldered in batteries shorten the time-to-landfill of their products improving their revenues.
Seriously: there is no reason why there could not be a standard form factor for battery cells. If we can do hard drives, CPUs and RAM I'm sure we can do batteries too.
You're still talking past me. A standard form factor won't solve the trust problem.
Most people don't know how to choose a proper hard drive compatible with their M.2 adapter or cable for their USB device. Many people also buy counterfeit USB sticks and SSDs that don't have near the capacity they advertise. You and other tech-literate people aren't the only consumers manufacturers are selling to. Nor are people always sufficiently educated, or living among stores with sufficient reputation to source from a reputable aftermarket vendor for their replacements.
Look, I'm really not sure where you are coming from. Batteries are solved problem since 1920. It's just gadget and computer manufacturers that suddenly see a way to make a uick buck and to drive their cycle of planned obsolescence.
If I could do it at 6 and my mom can do it at close to 80 then I really don't see why other people could not. Sometimes there just isn't a problem unless you make one. Standardize the cells, sell them through the supermarket chains at a normal price, just like Duracell and other quality battery manufacturers have been able to do for ages. Problem solved, once and for all. No need to go through AliExpress, Amazon or some other shady online store, if you are that concerned about trust then the only way to solve that is to buy from a reputable vendor.
The trust problem is better solved by relevant legislation. The counterfeit problem is better solved by relevant legislation. Intentional incompatibility with generic replacement parts will eventually also be solved by, you guessed it, relevant legislation.
See also: vacuum cleaner consumables, independent car repair
It would give reputable battery producers with all kind of certificates a thing and not buying dubious compatible batteries from Amazon/EBay/Ali/whatever a thing.
It would also make it easier for people to learn how to replace batteries.
Why not argue for better battery certification and quality control or more tolerant phone designs? You could probably detect low quality batteries with software and sensors and notify the user.
It doesn't seem consumer friendly to me. Aside from laptop, phone is five years old, replaced (consumer serviceable) battery twice (<$20), re-soldered USB connector once because of worn-out charging ($5, bought on ebay, don't have a solder, friend did it), replaced screen once due to a crack on screen and heavy rain. SD card of course so 8GB phone boosted by very affordable 64GB. Phone was less than $300, upfront no plan, when new.
When counterfeit batteries can explode and cause serious injury or death, I consider any measures to have the device reject counterfeit batteries consumer-friendly.
The T420 has been my main daily driver for nearly 6 years (using it right now to type this!) and I super excited to check this post out in more depth as battery duration is one of my biggest personal complaints about the system.
To those wondering about the T420, they are fantastically rugged and I still think they are the best laptop on the market assuming you can handle either a slightly crap monitor or the hassle to upgrade it. I've dropped them onto concrete, dremeled them, even lit them on fire, most of the time they'll take the abuse but even when they don't, they are dirt cheap so who cares! Ebay has them listed at $150 a replacement, you can literally buy nearly 10 of them before scratching the entry point for a Macbook. All of this while being able to a modern web-dev development setup thanks to it's incredibly simple upgrade bays.
What do you put in the upgrade bay that helps with web development? I upgraded from an x220 to x230 (modded to take the x220's classic keyboard) because the lack of hardware h.264 decoding in the '20-series CPUs was causing noticeable performance problems with web content.
I have a i7 4 core, 16gb, 512 ssd, 1080p, gpu accelerated, coreboot system.
I'm waiting on the open hardware platforms to come around to something like it before I upgrade. And I don't really feel the need to, apart from not having a 4 or 8k screen.
Pretty easy, but a bit expensive considering the laptop itself only costs around $150. A 1080p display + adaptor board for it costs about $100 and the 1440p display + adaptor is around $150. If you look up "T420 ips mod" you'll find lots of pictures and tutorials.
I had a big brother model of the t420, which uses the same battery and can also coreboot, the w520. It's the workstation model with i7 quad and a dedicated quadro graphics card. I understand the audience targeted here uses it mainly for development work.
So hardware video acceleration for newer formats isn't seen as a priority. That is an issue I came across, even with a quad core i7 and quardo, it struggle with h265 4k playback smoothly, and 4k vp9 pushed it a little hard too. 1080p youtube is fine as is x264, no problems there but x265 always gave it a little trouble.
There are many great things about it, but I thought I would mention the one drawback of an older thinkpad with older intel chips, is poor hardware accelerated video playback of newer codecs. If you stream online, it's a non issue mostly.
I had mine for 9 years before it finally died. I think the gpu overheated and burnt out, it gets to the login screen and then freezes. I was pushing it hard in terms of video encoding so part of it was my own fault. I still miss machine and that keyboard and nub.
Currently remaining battery %'s aren't exact because I'm assuming there is a linear coorelation between voltage and capacity (Which is wrong). I don't plan on fixing this, as the exact % is unimportant to me.
There are dedicated ICs which will give the remaining charge accurately, which may possibly be even cheaper than this ad-hoc solution.
I've read a few things about using charging circuits and battery fuel gauges but it's a bit beyond what I know how to do right now. I might look in to it more in the future, or maybe someone else who knows more than me can add a fuel gauge to the schematic :)
Hmm, it seems like all the fuel gauges I can find are designed to be incorporated in to a bms, instead of being added to the input/output of an already existing bms. Do you know if there's a fuel gauge that can work with 12v so I can just add it to the circuit I'm using?
That would probably work. That's how I was originally planning on doing it, but I got annoyed with the voltage logging not working properly when I set it up so I gave up and just went with the linear voltage -> capacity reading. A potential problem with this is that every battery pack would be different, and people who make this project on their own would need to generate a table for their pack.
You can find them on eBay for cheap. That makes them budget. Nobody cares if they were $9000 last year or a million when they were released. They are commonly found as cheap old business equipment or found in the trash. You can get a thinkpad today for under $600 new and and old ones for under $200. Ideapads have sometimes been more expensive than thinkpad so it's not a good metric.
What is more innovative? More Mhz? Vector calculations? JavaScript? Depends what's important to you.
The new CPUs don't put much more power, but they're crippled by the mitigations (old ones too but weren't when you used them), use way less power, many are fanless (saving more power), and it's not like anyone was struggling with not enough power on computer anyway. Intel had innovated a lot, especially their video decoding and graphics.
I'll take a crappier CPU with a better screen any day but luckily I don't have to choose with these.
Cool project, I wish battery stuff in general was more open-source friendly and not hidden in a wade of obscure datasheets.
What I'd really like to see one day is a web site/an app where one can input a pack voltage and sustained/peak amperage targets and the cell type that is to be used, and it will automa(t/g)ically create a controller schematic / parts list, with full safety features (balancing of all individual batteries, overcurrent/short circuit protection on load side, overtemperature protection on charging side) included.
So, no matter if you're building an e-cig, a drone or a way to power a mobile disco setup without lugging six car starter batteries around, it will always give you a solution that works.
Apparently those Thinkpads are from 2011-2012, that's old. What do people do with such old devices that makes building a battery from scratch worthwhile?
The T420 is old, but still has some advantages over laptops currently on the market. Up until 2018 many laptops still had dual core cpus like the i7-7500u which are worse than the i7-3840qm that can be put in a T420, and the few currently available laptops that have 1440p displays and quad core cpus are still pretty expensive. Some other reasons people still use the laptop are being able to use coreboot with it and the upgradability of it. It's really cheap to upgrade the laptop to work with bluetooth 5 and wifi 6 and multiple ssd's can be added using the two 2.5" slots and the one msata slot. Using this, someone could make a large 150wh or even 200wh battery that would let this laptop last longer than most new laptops.
For reference, I just looked up the benchmarks for the i7 3840qm. Seems to perform in the same ballpark as an i5 10210u for multicore, which is the base cpu in the current thinkpads. Intel really hasn’t made faster cpu’s in a long time.
The 3840QM has three times the TDP of a 10210U. A modern 45W part is going to be that much faster. Meanwhile the modern 15W part is also going to be a lot better in bursty single core desktop workloads.
Not old. Perhaps forever young. My T420 is 9 years old, both batteries are shot but that's my 'desktop', also have an X220, identical last-of-a-generation keyboards, with a fresh 9 cell battery for when on the move. Upgraded with SSDs and RAM; probably not great for gaming or video editing, but no interest in that and there's a PCMCIA bay sitting there just for such applications. I can't see myself changing for at least 5 years, and wouldn't change to something that doesn't have an excellent keyboard, which rules out most laptops including and especially Mac, nor something which can is hardened enough to survive being a little bashed on the floor, in backpack, left outside in sun or snow.
> something that doesn't have an excellent keyboard, which rules out most laptops including and especially Mac
Probably not very relevant to you, since Macs don't like being bashed into the floor too much, but the new post-butterfly keyboards are really nice IMO. Way nicer than that of my late 2013 MBP that got a new keyboard last year. They've really fixed that issue for me, and you still get the Touchbar with a physical ESC key, which IMO is a lot more useful than F-keys ever were.
>laptops that have quad core cpus are still pretty expensive
They are really not. If you are after performance on a tight budget, you can get a ThinkPad E14 with 6-core (that's 6 physical cores) Ryzen APU and 16GB of RAM for under 900 dollars [1]. You still get a good quality keyboard and the trackpoint nub if that's your thing (I'm a happy user of an older Thinkpad E485).
One of the mods that can be done is adding 1440p 14" ips display, like the LP140QH1-SPB1 from the carbon x1 gen 2. It's not as good as a new macbook pro display, but it's very nice to use.
Note that ThinkPads’ display quality always had been far behind competitors across the industry, at times of launch of each models, not against future laptops.
The T420 is the last model to feature the traditional ThinkPad keyboard (except for the special 25th anniversary ThinkPad), though it is possible to install the T420 keyboard in a T430. There is still a segment of ThinkPad users who prefer using the traditional keyboard, and some of them are willing to forego the performance and other features of more recent laptops in order to use the traditional keyboard. There is even a market for modded older ThinkPads with newer components, such as the X62 and x210 projects.
This. I bought my ThinkPad T420 around 2011 and have loved it ever since. In many ways, I could feel at the time that it signified both the pinnacle and end of an era. While the keyboard doesn't feel as nice as a model f, or beam spring, there's something to be said about using the red dot as a mouse, the aesthetics, the willingness to have every i/o interface imaginable, e.g. ethernet, wimax, wifi, serial, etc. I hope my T420 lasts forever, since the new ThinkPads come across as a cringeworthy attempt to be Apple, and I never settle for lesser inauthentic forms of things.
I'm running a T530 as my everyday rig, with Windows 10. I maxxed out the ram and got a ssd. It's fast, I can have numerous Chrome tabs, Sublime, and pdfs open, and quickly switch between them. Youtube videos play seamlessly. I can have multiple Kicad projects open. I genuinely don't feel the need for a faster computer.
The keyboard is the appeal; the T420 was the last model with the classic "7-row" keyboard design. The T430 and later have Macbook-style chiclet keys like everything else these days. It's one of the best portable SSH clients you can ask for, so the CPU power of the ThinkPad itself isn't that relevant.
I'm still using an X60 which is several years before that. It turns out that if you avoid the bloated "modern" software (which unfortunately includes much of the web stuff these days), it's perfectly usable. I use it for native development, browsing lightweight sites like HN, and the usual "office" stuff like email, IM (IRC), taking notes, etc. Likewise, my desktop is a first-gen i7 from roughly 10 years ago, only slightly newer than that, and also feels more than adequate.
How do you get around the issue of parts rarity? The Penryn/Merom generation is quite hard for parts replacement, especially so if you have anything Flexview (in my case, a T61 in a T60 4:3 chassis).
I use an X200, which is the generation before this. It just does what I want for media/web consumption and the light development work I do in my spare time. (I have a more modern Thinkpad for work. I think I'd be able to do the work on the X200, but maybe not in the way that I do with Typescript incremental compiles etc. VSCode would probably also suck.)
The only time I notice performance problems is bad websites, like Twitter or Reddit. But I'm getting a little stubborn about it, TBH, I don't think I should replace a perfectly working computer in order to use a site meant for displaying 500 character messages which worked perfectly well in its old incarnation. (And some of those same sites also suck on new hardware.)
There are a number of things that I do in my day-to-day life which I don't expect to ever change, things like maintaining a journal, sending and receiving text messages via e-mail, IRC or Signal, backup and organize pictures of my family, listening to music from my MP3 collection, watch videos (in reasonable but not ludicrous resolutions for the 12" screen), etc. These are things that I've done on this computer since I got it in 2009, they are completely solved problems and I would be extremely happy to use this machine until I die.
Today, even older 10 years old laptops are quite good at doing usual things like checking emails, browsing the web, watching a video or doing things like that on the go.
Even coding is generally doable (unless your project is extremely massive).
It gets the job done, even if it's not as fast as recent laptop (which is in turn not as fast as a recent desktop).
Also, buying these things can make a lot of sense for some people.
For example, in my case, I'm a big fan of cheap laptop (usually secondhand thinkpad) + decent desktop.
On one hand a decent desktop is much faster than almost any laptops available (and the few laptops that are faster have issues like heat, low battery life and being heavy).
On the other, a small Thinkpad (ex: x250) is a good enough compromise when on the go.
Also, as it's quite cheap (if secondhand), so it's not dramatic if it gets damaged which is always more likely for mobile objects.
A few years back, I slipped on a patch of ice, felt on my old x61, and completely broke the screen, I just bought another x61 and swapped the disk and it only set me back 130 euros which not as bad as breaking a brand new macbook pro in the same manner for example.
So, yes, in the end, it's worthwhile to maintain them and do things like changing the battery or replacing faulty components. And the after market for this things is quite developed, you can pretty much find any components on ebay or other web sites (I just did it last week with a broken DC jack replacement on an x230). Combine with the fact these are some of the easiest laptops to disassemble, it makes them remarkably serviceable.
Many of the changes to Intel CPU design over the past decade have been related to power efficiency, not necessarily performance. If you don’t care about trying the get every minute on battery, older machines like this are still perfectly usable.
I bought a T420, used, for $200 when I went away to college. I added an SSD to it, making the total around $300.
Six years later, it's still my only personal laptop: it's got all the specs I need[1], and works perfectly with Linux. The only downside to it is finding new batteries; I suppose that's why TFA is building their own ;)
[1]: All I do on it is browse the web, watch videos via MPV, send emails, and program.
I have a refurbushed x230 (12.5'' screen) with a i5 3320M processor, 8 GB ram and an 250 GB SSD. I bought it before a year for around 200 euros. This is the best laptop I've ever owned. It can compete speed-wise with most laptops in the 700-800 euro range and although it has been abused by my 3yo and 1 yo kids (they steps on it, throw it around etc) it doesn't even have a scratch.
It runs Windows 10 and I can easily develop on it using python (big django projects), elixir/phoenix, even java and clojure using VSCode. I think that with some patience it could even be used with Jetbrains editors (Intellij Idea, Android Studio etc). What's even more astonishing is that I can get like 2 hours of medium usage from its 8 yo battery!
What else could anybody want?
After my experience with that laptop I am now in the look for a good deal on a refurbished T4xx (14'' screen).
The x10-x30 series are a well known design and perform surprisingly well for 8-10 year old laptops. They're also more maintenance friendly (most T/W series) than their more current models.
You'd be surprised how many people use even older thinkpads. Graphics aside a x41 would still suit my needs. Actually if it wasn't for hd video and fancy css3 I wouldn't need to upgrade until I die. (I avoid scala and eclipse)
Not quite the same model, but I use an X230 (2013 model) as my primary machine at the moment (not counting the company-provided machine I use for work). It’s still a really nice machine, easy to service, and they’re dirt cheap on eBay!
Honestly, mostly I'll buy Lenovo-branded batteries on eBay for these things and hope they're new old stock and not counterfeit (or are at least high quality regardless). That is the biggest worry I have about using older laptops though; spec-wise, an old used laptop can honestly be just fine for a lot of people, myself included.
I'm glad hobbyist projects like this exist, but I wish they didn't have to.
As a concept, lots of industrial innovation are restricted due to lack of collaboration. Lots of University level innovation are restricted due to lack of lots of real world testing, open source can solve these two, but lacks lots of funding. Can all of specific industrial knowledge and technological knowledge be open source to the tune of making a viable product ?
I use a t430 with a t420 keyboard, and let me tell you haven't found no other laptop so comfy in layout terms. Yeah I would like a mechanical switch, but I'm happy to see the t420 still alive in the community.
Yeah, this is still needed even with coreboot. The attiny isn't doing anything too complicated, it's just there to tell the laptop the status of the battery. In the testing I did, if you supply 12v without any of the SMBus stuff the laptop will shut off after a few minutes of use.
I'm actually looking in to making a slice battery, it should be possible but sourcing the docking connector seems to be much harder than getting the battery connector.
Would it be possible to write directly to /dev/i2c in Linux and spoof the messages? Not sure what the use case of this would be, but might be useful for something.
Yep definitely, I had this exact thought last night and found an example kernel module to spoof a battery, and one to read i2c messages. There's probably all kinds of cool things you can do with a kernel module to communicate between the laptop's i2c port and a microcontroller. The docking connector conveniently has an i2c port on it, maybe I'll look in to this in the future
As an owner of a T420 and x230 thank you but these laptops are too old. The CPUs use like 25w, the screens are 99% really bad TN screens and a few touchscreen IPS on the x220t and x230t. The screens are the deal breaker. Lugging around a heavy laptop or a small laptop with a crappy screen sucks. The new generation starting wirh 40s are modern battery can have internal and external batteries and the screens aren't overpriced crap, you can easily find a cheap IPS in FHD for under $60 on eBay. These need adapters or expensive crappy screens that aren't produced anymore.
I wish they had better screens to make them worth using. Using an IPS and going back to these is hell, and the 720p on the T420 is also really saddening. It's the worst part of these computers.
I had the larger T520 (with the expensive at the time 1080p IPS panel) for about a decade and it was and still is great. Heavy though, and with the original battery now lasting about five minutes, it's essentially a desktop.
I use a T480 now, which seems to be the new sweet spot, as it's the last model made that has the combo internal + hot swappable external battery, and has a really nice wqhd panel option. Models with this panel are super rare on eBay, but you can still find the panel and cable and perform the swap yourself (slightly terrifying, though).
With the big external battery, I get around 10-12 hours (idles at ~6 watts), and combined with the lighter weight I now have an actual laptop again.
One slightly annoying thing about battery management controller though... You have no control over which cell it's going to discharge first. It seems to try and preferentially discharge whichever cell it thinks is less degraded. This makes sense in principle to keep cell wear even, but it would be nice to have an override.
For example, If you have two external batteries but it chooses to discharge the internal battery first, then you may not be able to hot swap by the time the external battery is discharged. It switches batteries at 5%, but by the time the other one is dead, 5% may be closer to zero - another parameter that would be nice to be able to change... Why not switch over at 15%?
Anyway, maybe in a few years when cells for this model are no longer available, someone will figure out how to write custom firmware for the BMC to give us these features.
The rest of the package makes up for it, for me. The keyboard is fantastic, the CPU is more than fast enough, enough ports, they're rugged as hell, and I can get at the parts to swap them out when they fail. It's always been a desktop replacement for me, so lugging it about was rare. I can forgive the screen. Mine spends most of its time plugged into a monitor anyway these days. I think the graphics chip might be on the way out, though, I'm starting to see rendering glitches...
The new keyboards are good too. Where are you getting the screen from? They're way overpriced when I find them (12.5in screens, 14in and 15in aren't much better either).
Wait until you get a T440P. About the same, but way more powerful and the screen and battery life are way better. Only like $120 usually and even less pretty often. The batteries are cheap and genuine too. I'm looking forward to more devices like the surface so Keyboards aren't attached to laptops anymore. The new Lenovo keyboard is pretty good but it's expensive!
I would imagine with works well with W520s too. Nice project!
Unfortunately aftermarket batteries are always a lottery and more often than not have really poor quality, if not even dangerous.
I've had two t410s, both have died after the screen hinge breaks in some fashion (nut wears through plastic, hinge breaks, then the plastic cover on the screen separates.
I got a few displays from aliexpress, all of them were good quality. If the seller has a good rating, they'll most likely send legitimate displays. You'll also need a FHD adaptor. Together the adaptor and the screen will easily be under $150.
I wonder how much of the design of those oldschool ThinkPads is patented or otherwise protected. What's to stop some enterprising hacker from making those replicas without authorization?
But it shows how irrationally our society is set up in some aspects. In an ideal world, you could just send the Lenovo engineer a mail and ask for the firmware source. But the incentives are such that they keep it secret, probably because they make a lot of money with batteries. So hackers spend a lot of time reverse engineering stuff. It seems really inefficient.