Protected Battery Board Question

Hi @minute !

I just received my replacement protected battery boards. I have not done anything like update my system or firmware in probably over a year. Are there any updates I need to run before or after installing the new boards?

Thanks

I can’t say for sure on the question myself, but while you have the reform open I’d personally say it’s worth doing. It only takes a micro-usb cable, and another machine to do so. With newer LPC firmware you’ll be able to get the battery status within linux ( LPC SPI Firmware and Driver Prototype ), and depending on how long it’s been since you updated possibly the older reduced battery consumption ones.

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What Chartreuse said! @Neelfyn kindly made an excellent guide in the iFixit system you can follow: How to flash MNT Reform LPC firmware - iFixit Repair Guide

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Whoa an iFixit guide, excellent!

I just ordered a pair of the new protected battery boards today and I was looking at the iFixit guide for replacing the battery boards. Thanks very much for making the guides @Neelfyn !

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You’re very welcome @sbates ! It’s really nothing complicated at all, but it’s always nice to be able to see that for yourself before you start tinkering, haha.

@darth-cheney The guide is super fresh, and one extra thing that I’ve had to do was to compile the firmware from the reform2-lpc-fw folder in the repo first. I haven’t mentioned that in the guide yet as I’m not sure that it’s intended — if I recall correctly last time I updated my LPC firmware, binaries were available. So I’ve pinged Lukas about this, but haven’t heard back yet.

In any case, on my system, building only required installing one extra package and downloading/compiling it like so:

sudo apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi
git clone https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform.git
cd reform-master/reform2-lpc-fw/tools/lpcrc/
make
cd ../../
make

This will create the bin/firmware.bin file that the flash.sh script requires.

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