Join me in the process of bringing back to life an old Boosted Board V1.
Initially I’ve started a thread on reddit but I have a feeling this is going to be a better place to document this and might even help others who tinker with their boards.
It’s the usual story: old board left unused for a very long time and now the I’ve found this burning desire to revive it.
For now I’m not looking to replace/change the electronics, we are only going to focus on rebuilding the battery. I’ve done the usual revival tactics like spinning the wheels for a while and the board does come to life with a drill hooked up to one of the motors, it doesn’t stay on and it doesn’t start charging.
I’ve managed to open up the pack (it wasn’t easy but I did not damage anything) and it looks like we got a total voltage of about 2v 
Next I measured all the individual cells and they’re pretty much completely dead. Some read a tiny bit over 0 but most of them nothing. I know this would mean the need to replace all of them and that’s what we’ll end up doing, but until the replacement cells arrive, we can do some more experimenting with this pack.
I hooked up one individual cell to a simple Lithium Ion charger and kept a voltmeter on the whole time. It slowly started charging it and within about 2 hours it got to a little over 2 volts. I stopped the charging at 2.6v and left it alone for a few hours, mainly because I had to leave. When I checked again, it showed 0.5v. This is as dead as it gets and there’s nothing I can do to revive it considering how quickly it discharged itself… or maybe the BMS did something and distributed over the whole pack? Just thinkin out loud… is this nonsense?
I’ll stick to the exact same cell type and going to try with some cheap ebay reclaimed pack. If nothing else, it will be a good exercise in rebuilding the pack and getting ready for a future full build.
So this is where we are now, I keep charging individual cells like this and monitoring the total pack voltage. Some cells stay charged, some get back to 0 pretty much instantly. I’d assume those are the dead ones. Right now we’re reading a little over 10v if I measure the main pack leads. I tried hooking up its original charger but it’s still the blinking red light thing… I’m wondering if I need to connect the ESC, maybe the Boosted BMS doesn’t like to be charged without the ESC connected… again, thinking out loud for now, but any tips are welcome.
I’ll keep posting updates when I take this apart and we’ll start to spot weld the new cells. We’ll do this next week, until then I’ll keep messing with the old cells, Ideally I’d like to see it charging by itself and the red blinking gone.
