About a year ago, I reported that my Bluetooth speaker had broken down and was able to determine that it was probably due to the charging electronics. At that time, however, I could not find a suitable charging board.
If you search for the right term, you will quickly find something suitable. My idea at the time was to look for a 7.4 or 8.4V charging board. But the term that is needed here is “2S”, because we have 2 3.7V batteries that are connected in series. So I bought this board for just under €5:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/275276607102?var=575545698944
Installation
Unfortunately, I couldn’t use the USB-C connection on the board because otherwise it wouldn’t have fit into the speaker’s housing. So I continued to use the micro-USB connection. The wiring is quite simple: The cable of the micro-USB connection is connected to VIN/GND and both the connections of the battery and the connections of the main board of the speaker are connected to BAT/GND. Now the speaker can be charged and used as usual.
I was then able to hide the board in the very back of the speaker.
Before that, I drilled a hole in the housing and filled it with hot glue at the approximate position of the LEDs of the charging board, so that you can also see from the outside whether the speaker is charging or is already full.
Next, I wanted to desolder the old charging LEDs, as I didn’t need them anymore and the red LED was permanently on, draining the battery.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work out as I had imagined, but at least I destroyed the LED with my action, which wasn’t what I had in mind, but had the same effect in the end.
And once again, a device was saved from being thrown away. 😉
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