Reviving a dead Boosted Board Mini

I need to a fix a Boosted Mini S for someone, the board’s remote won’t connect.
Tried to pair the board with my own Boosted Mini remote and it didn’t work.

The challenge accepted and I’m going to revive the board with DIY parts.
I’ll use Dual Flipsky 4.12 VESC and VX1 remote. I checked and it seems like
they will fit in the electronics enclosure.

My concerns are as follows:

  • Will I be able to use the original Boosted battery?
  • Will I be able to reuse, somehow, the Boosted motors? If not, what motors will
    be compatible? Maybe even replacing the motor mounts to accept 6355 motors?

Other tips will be appreciated. If anyone else did it before I would love to hear about the experience.

Thanks!

I really don’t know much about boosted from personal building experience, but from what I’ve heard, it’s very hard to use the battery with other things because the ESC communicates with their BMS over some special protocol that is locked down… Something like that.

The motors are less difficult but keep in mind they use encoders, not hall sensors, and I’m pretty sure they use the boosted special pin connectors as well.

You’d probably end up rebuilding the whole thing, honestly.

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I think you can use most of the hardwares but the esc and bms and remote has to go. Take the battery casing a part, find away to install a bms,. Install a dual esc/vesc, install a receiver and remote combo and try to fit all cables and components in the original booster enclosure. After all that you have a DIY board that looks like a boosted boards. It will be fun project for shelter in place.

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Thanks for the tips guys. However, I’m not sure if I’ll go for it in the end.

Seems like the Boosted battery won’t give any voltage if it’s not connected to the ESC,
furthermore the battery will turn itself off after about 30-60 seconds.
The guy who owns the board will probably sell it for parts, although I would love to continue with this project, but I’m not quite sure on the final costs of the process since the battery will probably be the hardest thing to beat, so eventually he backed off.

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I’ll buy the mounts if you’re able to get them off him

E: Actually nevermind xd

Woops :man_shrugging:t2:

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I remember seeing something about grounding a couple pins to make a boosted board battery work with a non-boosted esc but I can’t find it. Someone with more knowledge would have to help. Ditching the BMS is definitely the most straight forward option.

In general, motors will accept whatever you feed to them.

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Great news! If it is possible I’ll definitely continue with this project.
Now the only thing that left is to figure out what these pins are. :exploding_head:
If you will remember who this was it will be very helpful! was it in this forum or the other one?

As for ditching the BMS, no doubt about it - it’s the best option, I just prefer to not mess with the battery too much and let him sell it. If he can’t use it, maybe someone else will.

Your best bet is to look at the boosted bms wires vs other standard bms and see if they use an extra indicator wire. I asked the local boosted riders why they don’t just buy bigger batteries with better cells and they all swore up and down the esc would have a heart attack if you don’t use a stock battery.

As @Meeep said, they didn’t make any proprietary new electronics, it’s still motors, a controller, and a battery. Just gotta make them play nicely.

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So, I was able to salvage the Boosted battery, connected it to a VESC and even used the
original Boosted motors - everything seems to work just fine, but unfortunately the battery
cuts off power to the VESC after 10 minutes, and shuts off completely 1 minute later.

Does someone know if it is possible to disable this timer? So close yet so far…

Do you have any pictures of the boosted battery cabling where it connects to the esc?

@Style maybe your friend can sell his for parts and pick this up?

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Not from the US so unfortunately not able to get it, thanks though.

So the 2 large holes are obviously positive and negative.

I’m guessing the 3 smaller pins does some continuity check with the other half of the cable and will shut off if it doesn’t sense those pins.

Obviously playing around with battery pins is dangerous so be careful if you try anything.

I’d check continuity between those 3 small pins on the old esc and see if 2 of them specifically have continuity. It’s a gamble on which combination may trick the bms into not shutting down. This is risky.

You could also replace the bms with one rated for the same voltage/p group as your original. The cells themselves don’t know any different and your vesc would certainly work with a normally used bms.

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If I replace the BMS, will the power button still work? Will I need an anti-spark switch?

Yes you will need an antispark. Some bms have a built in power button but they don’t all provide an antispark. I have one cheap hub board like this (no antispark) so I try not to disconnect and connect the cables any more than I have to. Push button has been running strong otherwise.

Having some progress here.

Was able to make the Boosted SR battery to stay powered ON with an Arduino UNO and a CANBus module. Without this setup, the battery will turn itself OFF after 10 minutes. This makes it pretty unusable to ride. In addition, the battery LED indicator now stays Green (instead of faulty Red).

This solution is a bit bulky so I purchased another CAN module that has ATmega32U4 prebuilt on it,
which will free up much more space since I intend to use the original Boosted Mini S enclosure.

You can find more details from this GitHub project.

More updates to come.

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So today I received the Arduino + CANBus module that I was anticipating for.
I’m now able to use the Boosted battery via a VESC, with a very small footprint
that will most likely fit the Boosted Mini enclosure.

Next step is to remove all the connectors and solder the needed wires directly to
the PCB, this will make it even smaller and will minimize any connectivity issues.

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Now you just have to make it look fancy and sell it to the Boosted kidz on Reddit :wink:

tumblr_ns96xlzf801qehu0oo4_400

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how did this work out?

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Wait aren’t boosted batteries 13S? I don’t think that poor ESC can handle that kinda voltage