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How Boosted made it impossible to replace Li-ion cells in it's Boosted Rev battery

 In my previous post, I documented a complete step-by-step guide on how to replace the Li-ion cells inside a dead Boosted Rev battery. This ended in a complete failure...

Boosted did everything to prevent a rebuild or replacement of it's battery, here's why:

1: Everything is glued

By everything, I mean everything. Even the screws are glued in place. You cannot use heat to loosen up the glue due to the presence of the Li-ion cells. Overheating a cell could trigger an exploding cell. The cells themselves are glued, the cables are glued in place.... 
I succeeded to tear everything down by having lots and lots of patience, having a Dremel and using chemical solvents to loosen up the glue. Even then, there is a ton of residue still present and the original casing is rendered useless because I had to slice it open from both sides.

2: Replacing cells 'locks' the BMS

As you may know, Li-ion cells are managed by a BMS (Battery Management System). This circuit board is responsible for keeping the voltage differences between the different cells to a minimum. Boosted developed their own, custom BMS. Apparently, this BMS registeres the values of the cells at all times. Whenever the values of these cells 'change' (meaning their current value doesn't match the last recorded value), the BMS 'locks' itself, making it completely useless.

There are some folks out there that succeeded in resetting the BMS, I have not been able to try that out.

3: You can't just make your own battery

Many of you have thought about this already: just make your own battery and plug it into the ESC. But the ESC won't accept power from just any battery. The Boosted BMS implements a CAN-bus that receives messages from the BMS to 'prove' that it is an original part (together with some metadata, such as SoC).

4: The CAN bus only activates with 'heartbeat' on Blue line

Even if you would create your own BMS that implements the CAN-bus (and sends the correct messages), the CAN bus on the Boosted ESC will remain in IDLE state until the ESC receives a (i presume), heartbeat on the blue wire. It seems that it is not just any heartbeat, and I have not been able to reproduce it. From what I can tell, it is a clock signal running at 50kHz. (This value could well be different because I do not own an oscilloscope with sufficient range to perform an accurate measurement).

What I do know for sure is that without a clearly defined clock pulse (starting up with a ramp of 40ms), the CAN bus will remain IDLE.

5: The CAN messages are not the same as on the Boosted Extended Range v2 battery

Beambreak was able to reverse engineer a couple of CAN messages to emulate a working battery, based on the extended range v2 battery, but the engineers at Boosted seem to have changed the CAN messages for its Boosted Rev scooter.
I have not been able to prove this theory, but chances are you will not be able to fulfil all sanity checks using the work Beambreak did.


So there you have it. In my opinion, Boosted over-engineered the Boosted Rev so much that, although it is a brilliant product, it has become absolutely un-repairable. This is unfortunate, as even a local store or workshop would be incapable of performing a repair.

Read my next Blog post about how I replaced the Boosted Rev insides by using a custom battery and a Stormcore ESC.

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