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You could take a legitimate battery and swap good cells for cheaper or old cells. The actual cells usually don't have any smarts to them and would still show as
by wildzzz 5y ago
You could take a legitimate battery and swap good cells for cheaper or old cells. The actual cells usually don't have any smarts to them and would still show as having a full charge but the range would be limited. It could take at least one depletion cycle for the processor inside to realize the cells are of poor health and may just look normal to untrained eyes. Proper security would include soldering batteries in, welding the plastic seams shut, or adding tamper indicators in the battery like a switch on the lid. The system could just refuse to charge any tampered batteries or the attendant could refuse to swap any batteries that have obvious damage.
- connicpu 5y agoA lot of battery controllers are intentionally designed to make the batteries unusable if the cells are removed for even a moment. Sometimes the controller uses a volatile ROM that wipes itself when it loses voltage, other times there's software actively looking for it and stopping the controller from working when detected. It's very consumer unfriendly in general for batteries that the consumer supposedly owns, but for batteries that are more loaned property like this it's a reasonable anti-tamper system.