Exploding laptop batteries

I'm looking to add an fdi file to HAL so we can check if a battery is defective and is likely to go boom.

I want to see if I can match battery serial numbers against fdi rules and if present, merge a key battery.is_likely_faulty so applications like gnome-power-manager can give a nice warning message so the user can go check on the recall website.
Note, I think we need to keep the word “likely” to avoid lawsuits. :-)

So, I need some data. If you have a Dell laptop:

 – Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810
 – Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100,
9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705
 – Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90
 – XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710

Or an HP/Compaq laptop:

HP Pavilion : dv1xxx ze2xxx
Compaq Presario: V2xxx M2xxx
HP Compaq : nx48xx

I would really appreciate if you could send me (richard at hughsie dot com) the complete output of lshal. Include [fire] in the subject so I can filter them easily :-). And also, if you know your laptop might be affected (or another one that might have been affected) and isn't a DELL or HP then please send me the data also.

IMPORTANT NOTE
: Don't panic. Your battery is probably fine, but I want to see if these models express the battery serial number in HAL (via ACPI) or just fill in junk data.

Thanks.

UPDATE!

Please also state:

  • If your battery is affected by the recall
  • The value of your barcode
  • cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT*/info | grep number

Also, I would appreciate it if someone could test this hal patch as it looks like it's needed to properly detect the DELLs.

Published by

hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

One thought on “Exploding laptop batteries”

Comments are closed.