Dyson

Dyson is a manufacturer of (expensive) vacuum cleaners.

Battery packs lacking cell balancing, featuring self-bricking firmware

Dyson battery packs contain a Battery Management System (BMS) with a chip that would be capable of balancing the individual cells. However, the manufacturer has decided to leave away a few inexpensive but essential resistors, resulting in no balancing to take effect. As a result, the battery pack wears out much quicker than necessary.

After just a few years, spare battery packs are "out of stock" (e.g., the Dyson V8 SV10 Battery being currently unavailable in Germany), effectively suggesting that the device should be thrown away.

Even if one charges (using a third-party charger) and balances, or even replaces the individual cells, the Battery Management System will still not allow you to charge the battery because its firmware writes 2 bytes into the configuration memory of the microcontroller that essentially bricks the battery pack. However, third-party open source firmware has been written to replace the proprietary firmware for some models, and for some models it has been found out which configuration bits need to be changed in order to un-brick the battery pack. This has been covered in the (specialist) media.

This anti-consumer and anti-repair pattern can be observed across multiple models and product iterations, and appears to be fully intentional.

Open source software has been written to un-brick the battery pack by overwriting the configuration bits for some models using a 3.3V Raspberry Pi board.

Unfixable buttons

There have been reports of buttons being "unfixable" due to the use of glue.