Looking for the original pt-battery-fw-update utility for a pi-top v1 battery
I am trying to recover the battery in an original pi-top v1 and am looking for a copy of the old pi-top battery firmware/recovery utility commonly referred to as:
pt-battery-fw-update
It may also have been described as a battery firmware updater, battery patch, over-discharge fix, or battery BMS recovery tool.
The problem
The battery is detected correctly over SMBus/I²C at address 0x0B and reports plausible data:
Voltage: approximately 16.65 V
Charge: 99%
Remaining capacity: 2802 mAh
Full-charge capacity: 2840 mAh
Design capacity: 2900 mAh
Cycle count: 2
Temperature: approximately 26.7°C
Battery status: initialized, discharging, fully charged
However, the pi-top loses power immediately when external power is disconnected.
This resembles the documented original pi-top battery problem where the battery controller sets an over-discharge or protection flag. The cells and fuel-gauge data may appear healthy, but the battery output remains disabled until the old recovery utility clears or repairs the controller state.
The utility we are trying to find
Historical instructions appear to have used a standalone ARM executable downloaded approximately as follows:
wget http://assets.pi-top.com/patches/pt-battery-fw-update
chmod +x pt-battery-fw-update
sudo ./pt-battery-fw-update -d
The file now appears to be gone from assets.pi-top.com.
Reports suggest:
- It was intended for the original pi-top v1 battery.
- It may have required WiringPi.
- It communicated with the battery or BMS at a low level.
- It sometimes had to be run repeatedly because I²C communication was unreliable.
- Multiple successful runs were sometimes recommended.
- It was separate from the later general
pt-firmware-updater. - It may never have been distributed as a normal Debian package.
What we have already ruled out
We recovered several historical packages from the old pi-top repository, including:
pt-firmware-updater 2.0.0-1
pt-device-manager versions 2.5.1 through 4.1.4
python3-pitopcommon 0.5.0
python3-pycrc 1.21
The general pt-firmware-updater is not the same utility. It expects a firmware-upgradable I²C device exposing identification and update registers such as 0xE0–0xE6, and the original v1 hub does not respond to that protocol.
We also inspected the original v1 hub implementation:
pthub_spi.py
pthub_i2c.py
The SPI side handles screen brightness, lid state, screen blanking and shutdown. The I²C side only reads ordinary Smart Battery registers at 0x0B. Neither contains the special battery recovery operation.
The surviving pi-top APT archive and its package Contents index do not contain a file named pt-battery-fw-update.
Request
Does anyone still have a copy of this executable on:
- an old pi-topOS SD card;
- an original pi-top v1 installation;
- a Downloads folder or backup;
- an old Packagecloud package cache;
- an internal pi-top support archive;
- a Git repository or source tree?
Likely filenames or search terms include:
pt-battery-fw-update
battery-fw-update
battery firmware update
battery recovery
battery patch
over-discharge
overdischarge
BMS reset
Useful commands for searching an old system might include:
sudo find / -type f \( \
-name 'pt-battery-fw-update' -o \
-iname '*battery*fw*' -o \
-iname '*battery*firmware*' \
\) 2>/dev/null
Search the APT cache:
find /var/cache/apt/archives \
-type f -iname '*battery*' -o -iname '*firmware*'
Search command history:
grep -RniE \
'pt-battery-fw-update|battery.?fw|over.?discharge' \
~/.bash_history /root/.bash_history 2>/dev/null
Even if the binary itself cannot be shared, any of the following would help:
- the exact download URL;
- the package or repository name;
- a SHA256 checksum;
- output from
file,strings,readelforldd; - source code;
- screenshots or copied instructions;
- the name of the battery-controller chip;
- details of which SMBus commands the utility sent;
- contact information for the former developer or support employee who created it.
Please do not run the utility on a modern pi-top or an unrelated battery. This request concerns the original pi-top v1 battery hardware.
Thank you—any old files, institutional memory, or leads from long-time owners, hackers, former resellers, or former pi-top employees would be greatly appreciated.