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26Mar/212

Apple eMate 300 – Battery Refurb

Whilst fixing the hinges in my eMate 300, I noticed that there were also links to replacing the batteries. That link shows how to replace with proper cells, but it turns out that you could also use a battery holder.

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I bought a full kit of bits to do the latter, but then realised that the installation required hacking out the existing cage for the battery. Not wanting to do this, I fell back to the soldering idea and wished I'd bought batteries with solder tabs instead of just standard AA-style cells.

Anatomy of a Battery Pack

The eMate 300 battery back has a socket with 5 pins/4 wires, a thermistor, 4 cells and a temperature switch at the far end. When replacing the cells, remember to keep everything but the actual cells themselves.

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Peel the plastic off and then de-solder or cut all contacts. And keep the temperature switch!

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Solder everything back together in the same order...

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And then jam it back in the plastic case that it all came in...

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If you're in luck...

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You'll have a charging battery!

Testing it...

There doesn't seem to be an SSH client for the Newton (although people have tried), so I thought I'd go for Telnet. It seems easy to do over a serial cable, but I want to do it over Wifi! Thankfully there's the PT100v1.1 Client available over at United Network of Newton Archives.

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Installing this got me a prompt... but a swift disconnection when trying to log in. But, the battery is still showing full charge after minimal use over two days! Win.

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  1. Great site! Keep up the amazing work articles, really very interesting.


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