[SPARCbook] Re: Batteries

[Jonathan Kalbfeld]

FYI, I bought a super heavy duty power station at Radio Shack (~$35) + car
charger cable, and it works great, but only if the battery is removed.  If
not, the screen goes haywire/snowcrash.

This should give something like 5 hours.  Great for camping or long
astronomy trips, but if anyone has any suggestions for smaller more
compact batteries, let me know... perhaps something the form factor of the
floppy drive.  I think I might venture down to fry's and actually buy the
parts and build something using NiCd's but if there's something ready-made
it's worth the hassle.

The guy at radio shack had never seen a sparcbook and asked where he could
buy one. :)

jonathan

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Chris Powell wrote:

>
> Jonathan Kalbfeld wrote:
>
> > I contacted tadpole here in California but they don't have any batteries
> > for the S3 series any more (can you blame them?)
>
> Be aware the 'S3 series' includes the 50MHz MicroSPARC I SPARCbook 3 and
> 3LC which use different, and incompatible, battery packs to the later
> MicroSPARC II and TurboSPARC 3XS/3XP/3GS/3GX/3TX/3000. If you ask for
> an S3 pack, you might end up with the wrong thing....
>
> > I'm concerned about the battery being NiMh and having a limited life, and
> > I've probably used this for 100 hours in the last 2 weeks already.
>
> That's a lot! In fact, this is amazing as that's about 7 full battery
> cycles a day (unless you are getting > 1 hour run from a pack).
>
> > I looked into doing that, but cannot figure out how to open the casing,
> > and don't want to expiriment with a working battery.  Has anyone here
> > attempted to rebuild the standard one?  It seems to juse use AA cell NiMH,
> > but I'd like to build one with Li ion batteries, or at least pick up 2-3
> > more NiMH battery packs.
>
> I'd stick with NiMH in the internal pack - that's what the charging
> circuitry thinks should be there. On no account try Li Ion cells in the
> pack! Li Ion cells require specialist charging circuits and are
> dangerous if you don't....
>
>
> Chris.
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:wq!