Raspberry Pi with touch screen Makita battery lockout repair with Open Battery Information

Published at : 23 Dec 2025

Unable to charge or use your Makita battery, why?
Does it really have a hardware problem or has it just been locked out in software?

Taking things one step farther, let's setup a Raspberry Pi with a touch screen to repair locked out Makita 18V (and possibly others in the future) batteries. This is one step closer to making a kind of portable appliance. The last step missing is to setup a read only filesystem (maybe in a future video).

Now that we have Open Battery Information working on a small Adafruit Trinket M0 enclosed in a charger case let's go one step more and make a semi-portable solution with a Raspberry Pi (handling the Python application) with a touch screen.

Items required:
Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 (5 recommended), 2GB model or better
Touch LCD screen (official Raspberry Pi 7" touch screen recommended)
Case for the LCD screen recommended
USB-C power supply Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 (tested to work with Raspberry Pi)
Micro SD card (64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro recommended)
USB keyboard and mouse (required for some parts of setup)
Computer to create the Raspberry Pi SD card (Windows, MacOS, or Linux)
Open Battery Information programmed Arduino (see links below for assembly instructions) (this video assumes this part is already assembled and functioning correctly)

Resources used in the video:
Raspberry Pi 7" Touch Screen Assembly Guide
https://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/raspberry-pi-7-touch-screen-assembly-guide

How to set up the Raspberry Pi 7 Touchscreen
https://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to-raspberry-pi-7-touchscreen

How to Run a Raspberry Pi Program on Startup
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-run-a-raspberry-pi-program-on-startup/all

If you would like to see how to get this Adafruit Trinket M0 programmed please check out the previous videos (below).

Building Open Battery Information with (Arduino) Adafruit Trinket M0 into the battery charger case
https://youtu.be/3QhsOQUzpIg

Setting up Open Battery Information on an (Arduino) Adafruit Trinket M0
https://youtu.be/1yGGF7F5GFM

The Adafruit Trinket M0 is available for purchase from Adafruit directly. They make a lot of really cool products for development or hobby projects, I recommend you check them out.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3500

The Open Battery Information project can be found at the below link:
https://github.com/mnh-jansson/open-battery-information

Related videos, and links are below:
Makita battery lockout, full guide setting up Open Battery Information, part 1 of 3, hardware
https://youtu.be/OeKCjAiLS9o

Makita battery lockout, full guide setting up Open Battery Information, part 2 of 3, software
https://youtu.be/yMnqnIM8TFs

Makita battery lockout, full guide setting up Open Battery Information, part 3 of 3, Python
https://youtu.be/3ueKLaRp64E

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:43 Raspberry Pi
2:25 Needed parts
8:03 Creating the SD card
11:14 Assembling hardware
13:57 SD card done
14:21 Raspberry Pi startup and settings
19:20 Download Open Battery Information
21:06 Open Battery Information setup
22:33 Creating desktop shortcut
26:07 Automatic startup script
30:14 LCD screen setup
35:51 LCD connections
39:43 LCD screen case assembly
42:59 LCD power and touch connections
45:19 Testing
46:30 Fixing screen orientation
48:17 Final testing
49:54 Conclusion