Thomee Wright wrote:
> In article <58146@palm-dev-forum>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says...
> -snip-
>
>> If you can power feed the M100 via the serial cable (which I take from
>> Thomee's initial posting) it may be possible to recharge the accus
>> during external power feeding. I would like to open my M100 to check
>> this, but it is still under guarantee.
>>
>> Wolfgang
>
> -snip-
>
> Sorry if I gave that impression. I don't believe that is possible, as
> much as it would make my life easier. We're feeding power to the unit
> through the battery contacts in the back, and will probably house our
> "backup" AAAs outside the m100.
One suggestion I would make, esp. if you're already rigging up an
external battery backup rig, would be to consider using an RC-car
battery. Way back before I was hacking on Palms, I did
some pretty serious hacking on my HP95(and later 100)LX. I rigged up a
connector that would let me hook up a 1500-2400 maH 9V battery designed
for use with radio control cars to the HP. The current going out of it
was enough to trick the power supply in the HP into thinking it was
running on wall current and it would leave it's AAs alone. I never
actually ran a full-out exhaustion test on it, but suffice to say that
the only time I ever had to recharge it was when I was using a PCMCIA
card like ethernet or a modem and even then it took about 8-10 hours to
drain it.
If you were to attach a high-capacity battery like this to the Palm, it
should give you the life expectancy you're looking for. The other
advantage to this is that these are high-cycle batteries meant to be
drained and charged over and over and over again. They're built to be
beat on and can be recharged in about 15 minutes. Cost is a bit more
than what you'd pay for a "valu-pack" of AAAs.
Of course, it almost goes without saying that you'd have to figure out
the polarity, volt/amp step-down,etc. yourself, but that doesn't sound
like it would be a problem for you.
Just something else to think about,
'dillo
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