Battery board pinout and how the two cells are wired
Reference thread for anyone touching the battery board: J1 and J2 are identical, the two 18650s are simply paralleled, and the AXP228 is a single-cell charger.
What it takes
- Disassembly
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
Menkalinan opened the thread wanting to fit a 3S pack or a LiPo with its own BMS and got the definitive answer instead. Thoman's pinout: J1 and J2 are the same 4-pin header, one cell each, pins 1 and 2 shorted for the cell positive and pins 3 and 4 for ground. NekoRouter and Godzil add that the cells are paralleled, not balanced, that the diodes protect the device rather than the cells, and that the uConsole mainboard is the DevTerm V3.14 design, so the published schematic applies; the AXP228 PMIC on the mainboard does the charging and feeds the 3.3 V and 5 V rails. Mark, a charger engineer, closes the balancing worry: two cells in parallel are forced to balance.
CRANK's 6-cell thread later identifies F1/F2 as PTC fuses and D1/D2 as polarity protection. Read this before the 10 Ah LiPo, 2 × 5,000 mAh or holder-removal entries.
Links
Open at Forum threadRelated mods
On the original CM4 image the kernel left the charger at 300 mA while running; a one-line udev rule sets constant_charge_current to 2.4 A.
beams' MSK12C02 slide switch uses the pads HackerGadgets reserved on the NVMe battery board to cut the cells — and the NVMe — without a hole in the case.
A Crouzet 83170.4 microswitch on the battery board's J6 pads, reached through the rear antenna hole, gives a CM5 a reset button without drilling.
null glued a lever-less D2MSL normally-closed switch behind a small hole in the case; a paperclip press cuts battery power when the console locks up.
bryank7bat's take on HackerGadgets' R14/J6 provision: a 2-pin connector on the board and a toggle or push-lock button in a hole drilled in the case bottom.
CRANK's 6 × 18650 plan: strip the holders off the battery board, wire two banks of three cells in parallel through bus bars, and house them in a printed back.