On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:55:39 -0500, wrote:
On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:27:16 +0200, EdorFaus wrote:
On 10/11/2011 07:46 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Does it matter that I touched both color wires of each one to
the terminals?
This may be my problem. When I cut one strand of wire, there are
already
2 types of wire, copper and red/green. Maybe I should use THOSE 2
instead of 2 separate strands of 2?
Let me see if I understand you correctly: you have two lengths of
headphone wire, both of them with two wires in it (one not-insulated
plain copper, and one insulated (with a color)), and you have
connected both wires of one length to + on the battery and + on the
Ben, and both wires of the other length to - on the battery and - on
the Ben? And neither length is connected to the other?
If so, this should not be a problem in itself, as long as there is
an
electrical connection - but you should only really need one wire for
each of + and -, so you could instead use just one length and e.g.
connect the uninsulated wire to - on both, and the insulated one
(after stripping some of its insulation) to + on both.
Or if you prefer to use two lengths, you could connect just one wire
from each (e.g. the uninsulated copper wire).
In either case you need to be careful so that + and - don't touch
each other anywhere - there must be some isolation between the two.
One thing you can try is, after connecting the wires to the battery,
measure the other ends of the wires to see if there's a good voltage
there. If not, there either isn't a good connection between the
wires
and the battery, or (at least one of) the wires is broken.
To figure out which wire has the problem, you can measure between
the
other end of the + wire and the - connector on the battery (or vice
versa), if that gives a good voltage then that wire should be OK.
Once you've connected the wires to the Ben, you can measure on its
contacts to see if there's a good voltage there - if there is, you
should be good to go (as long as you haven't gotten + and -
reversed).
Oh ok I did not know I have to strip the colored wire because that
means insulation. I will try again using only 2 wires. Thanks
_______________________________________________
OK so I found a line in / headphone wire and cut it and stripped it,
finding that it insulated a red and black wire. I separated those and
stripped some of the ends. I tied the closest thing I could to a knot
around the battery ends of the Ben and twisted the ends a bit to prevent
slipping under mechanical tension. Then I put the Ben upright, attached
the other ends to the marked and corresponding ends, and I tried to
secure the wire to the battery terminals by winding a rubber band around
it a few times. Since the connection was dodgy at first, I heard what
sounded like the speaker popping as the final unconnected wire touched
briefly with the terminal. But I saw the screen light up for a
millisecond. I knew I was in. I later taped the wires in place on the
battery, and in addition pressed them down to maintain contact and
voila, this hack was succesful!
As for the practicability, it may be questionable, but the liberty of
the hack is considerable. This means in an emergency or even if I just
wanted to be hard-core, I could use my Samsung, Motorola, LG, Nokia,
etc. 3.7V batteries to get some life out of my Nano. For some batteries,
they would need wires because they would not fit in the casing. For
others, that are actually too small and with misaligned contacts, I
still dream of an easy way to get a thin strip of copper or some other
metal and bend it with small plyers into an "l" shape to sort of extend
the Ben battery contacts by only a few mm, then stuff paper or some
other shim on the back side of the battery to make a nice tight
sandwich. I may be off base though.
Needless to say, this opens up SO many more batteries that are usable
and recyclyable from old phones and such, I even have a camcorder that
no longer works that is 3.7V 850Mah that I lost the charger to. If you
are willing to go a little caveman, as I now am, you can power your Nano
with almost any kind of cheap available battery. Of course provided the
voltage is right.
Any ideas how I can make this cleaner? Perhaps alligator clips or a
better type of wire?
This hack has empowered me that much more! Thanks for the help.
Maybe Werner can make copyleft plans to make an adapter for most 3.7V
batteries. That would be cool.
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