[mikelovenotwar]

Dyson batteries are a good example:

Dyson vacuum batteries are designed to fail

* Series battery cells in a battery pack inevitably become imbalanced. This is extremely common and why cell balancing was invented.

* Dyson uses a very nice ISL94208 battery management IC that includes cell balancing. It only requires 6 resistors that cost $0.00371 each, or 2.2 cents in total for six.

* Dyson did not install these resistors. (They even designed the V6 board, PCB 61462, to support them. They just left them out.)

* Rather than letting an unbalanced pack naturally result in lower usable capacity, when the cells go moderately (300mV) out of balance (by design, see step 3) Dyson programmed the battery to stop working...permanently. It will give you the 32 red blinks of death and will not charge or discharge again. It could not be fixed. Until now.

https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS

[tjoff]

That is not about saving cents tough.