A couple weeks ago I was asking about the low battery light on my NEC when using rechargeable batteries. The problem was that after about 45 minutes the low battery light would come on because the voltage difference (1.2 vs 1.5) of Alkaline vs NiMh batteries. Originally I was going to look at the power supply itself to see if I could replace a resistor so that the light would come on at a lower voltage. I opted to leave the power supply alone and focus on the battery.
I bought ten 1/3AA NiMh batteries and built a battery pack. There are two banks of five 1/3AA batteries and two spacers(S1 & S2). The ending battery pack looks like this: + - | S1 S2 | | | | | | | | | --- --- S1 has a wire that goes to ground, and S2 has a wire going to positive. The two 5 battery banks are in parallel and each bank has a capacity of 300mah, giving a total capacity of 600mah. The batteries that I took our of the original NiCd back were 500mah so it's very similar to the original which was rated to give 5.5 hours. I'm still testing but so far the battery light issue has gone away. I need to see how much time I have left once the low battery light comes on because rechargeable batteries fall off rather quickly. Voltage on the pack is 6.4v when charged. Very similar to what new Alkaline batteries would give. A Regular 4 battery NiMh battery pack has a much longer run time but the problem is that you never know when you are almost out of power. The low battery light is on almost the entire life of the battery. I'll keep you posted on my testing results. Kurt
