Xiaomi Mi 1S upgrades

Here I will be uploading some upgrades I make to my electric scooter. I want to modify its firmware, dynamic behavior, external appearance, thermal and water resistance, and some other stuff.

Before anything else: disassemble the scooter

2-apr-2023

The scooter's disassembly is not hard. For the electronic parts (what I want for now), I started removing the backplate. Here we can access the battery, the charging port and the controller. Here we can find also some space where the ESP32 will be placed.

Next step was removing the dashboard cover. It's glued into the chassis, so it can be removed easier using heat (a simple hairdryer is ok). Then we can access the dashboard PCB and the headlight screws.

The dashboard PCB uses 4 wires: the red one gives 5V when the scooter is powered on, the green one gives direct voltage from the battery (about 36v), even if the scooter is powered off, the yellow wire is used for data transmission between the dashboard and the ECU, and the black wire is for GND.

The top wires from this PCB are for the handlebar's components: headlight, gas and brake lever sensor. Headlight runs at 5V. For now, I will be using this signal to detect when my added lights should be powered on.

Under the headlight we can access the screws to remove the handlebar, but for now, it won't be neccessary.