I bought a blackberry playbook with the intention of repairing it's battery. Although not the best device out there, it serves my purposes as a battery monitor using 'battery guru' to detect cells in series/parallel and to create a pleasant touch screen interface as well as a portable media source on my e-bike. This is generally aimed as a fun project for those who have not got into the tablet way of things yet to see some point in getting one to fix.
The housing of the PB contain two 3780mah batteries at 4.15v each.
Internal resistance of the li-polymer cells was between 15 and 17 m Ohms suggesting that the high IR of the cells showed that they were either poor quality or on their way out.
however my ultimate aim is to replace these two cells inside the PB and get the original battery life, but until parts become readily available (like the cc/cv charging circuit) I will have to make do with building an external battery, and as a plus, obtaining a much higher ah rating for the PB. This should make it very useful using it on long car journeys / as a reader / media player etc.
I should add that the speaker quality of the playbook and webcam ability far surpasses that of the ipad.
my curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the playbook to find out the innards more accurately.
I decided it would be Ideal to share photos and info (for those of us with
dead ipad or playbook lipo cells on replacement sources or hardware (external) upgrades.
In this instance, I have managed to upgrade the battery by adding hinges to an external 15000mah power source that I picked up off dealextreme.com and added two laptop screen hinges I had lying around.
The benefits of this project adds self standing ability to the playbook, space for a keyboard (to hinge out from under the external battery), and nearly triples the battery life of the device from 5400mah to 15000mah, thereby the playbook now lasts up to 40 hours of continuous usage / ebook reading / need for speed gaming, wifi browsing and other things. I must also add that, after removing the two lithium polymer batteries, the playbook has added negligible weight, making it slightly thicker, albeit the battery time more than makes up for this in my opinion.
I will be adding photographs of the hacking attempt, and would welcome any positive feedback on component parts / charging cc/cv modules for other people in and out of the forum to comment.
The reason I did not post this on crackberry.com is because I like this site and want to contribute positively.
Kind regards
silverrich1
please note, this is for educational purposes only, i don't take responsibility for anything you do with lipo, lipo cells are dangerous, this is strictly a hack, and voids your warranty, you do all this at your own risk, I did it at my own risk.
below I have attached some photographs of the hacking attempt, what the blackberry playbook looks like inside,
