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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.

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.

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

Solder everything back together in the same order...

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

If you're in luck...

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.

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.