A battery for the Beast

[Will-i-am]

Here's the deal... the Beast's battery is busted. Broke off clean on the mobo and I am an artist, sculptor but suck at soldering tiny wires, especially since the Beast has that unique '060 cpu board... anything I break can't be replaced. I've been told by very knowlegable people at this site that you can take a cordless phone battery at 3.6v and hook it to the external battery pins and solve the problem. Except all those batteries are rechargable and nobody yet has told me that there is a recharging feature to those pins. Sooo, since the battery comes with a note to charge said battery for X hours before using, I'm proposing to charge said battery by making sure it's compatible with one of the several old cordless phones I have down here and attach the battery to the base of the phonecharger and charge the sucker up. Then I will attach the battery to those little pins which say "Battery". Thus the Beast should have a way to hold the date and time and whatever the battery does otherwise. And the only real fear I have (aside from the present administration in the White House) is the meaning of the "600mAh" after the 3.6V note on the battery. Other batteries had different numbers there and I have no freaking idea what I'm doing so how bad could it be? Am I dangerous, or just foolish? and of course this is all the result of the  original battery breaking off at the board so there's just this tiny little metalic spot to which a replacement would otherwise be soldered, if I could solder worth beans. Comments?

[Will-i-am]

Well, just to make it interesting, the Beast says it is an A4000T Rev 4. It also says "Berlin/DH/SS/JH/DF/GF/JD/MN/PL/Fish" So go figure. I guess I still have some doubts about the potential ability of the Beast to charge the dang battery. I'll tell ya what, though... It sure can keep me interested. Aside from having a shop built '060 card almost everything about the thing is slightly different from what the various sources give me. Kind of reminds me of this redhead I used to "visit" back in Phoenix. She always traveled with this siamese cat on her shoulder, and I mean always!  :-P  But she kept me interested...

[Will-i-am]

X-Ray, precisely! Likewise, would charging it on a phone base before attaching it make this experiment possible? Don't want to hurt the Beast, she's doing the best she can...

[Will-i-am]

The coin battery had been previously repaired/soldered by my pal Larry (the late great Larry) (the guy who gave me this and the desktop A4000) but it broke off real close, like flush, to the mobo. I could, I suppose, try to solder something to that tiny little bit of metal and maybe it would work, but as x-ray  suggested, if these pins are sitting there marked "battery" I should be able to pop some kind of battery onto them and away we go. And the question was that since it appears they are not part of a recharging circuit, and since I have yet to find a similar battery, ie 3.6V etc, which comes pre-charged, would it be a reasonable thing to do to take this cordless phone battery which is a 3.6V battery, charge the thing on a spare cordless phone base, of which I have maybe 4-5 in the pile of electrical crap in this computer complex in my basement...*pant, pant*....and then pop it's little pluggy ends onto the pins which seem to be provided  for this very event... But I was wondering if these pins ever had any specific battery in mind? Do any of the people who actually took part in the design of this board still breathe air and walk around, un-brain-damaged and with some of their memories intact so somebody with expertise could answer the question of what kind of process dealing with these pins would result in my having a one-of-a-kind A4000T/060 whose clock worked? sigh. Pretty simple. Somebody designed this board. Somebody knows what kind of battery goes onto these pins. I am unsatisfied with the soldered connection since I have proof that it can break off and spoil my day. It already has. Not a big deal per se, but like so many questions about the Amiga hardware, it's not easy to get an answer that refers to my personal Amiga sitting there with it's guts exposed and all it's potential unrealized. Like the Toaster 4000 in there, and maybe the AmaxII over there... and the ethernet card...None of which so far has actually been able to consistantly work. Not that Im angry or anything, seriously, but frustrated. My life is full of frustrations. I have a degenertive spinal disease which leaves me in a lot of pain most of the time. I have a son in a coma-state for the last 5 years. My daughter is 3 years into college and now they say her loans are maxed out. I have 5 Amigas and the (potentially) most exciting one has a busted battery and I'd like my files to be able to say todays date rather than "future"... and there are other issues with having no battery... and that's the story top to bottom. Dig it? Not pissed, just frustrated. I've had a couple of very smart men who can build a computer from scratch come in and look at it and neither had enough experience with Amigas to make a dent in it. They tried various things and then scratched their heads and said "Go on line..." and that's what I'm doing. Woof. I'm thinking about turning on the power and putting a volt-ohm meter across the two pins to see what the needle does, but since I don't really know squat about meters I'm not sure what I would do with the information... Gez I hate being ignorant. Clay and fire are my arena. I can build you a forge, a kiln, a foundry and make armor, tools, glass, etc. But I can't get a damn battery into this computer. grrrr. sorry. Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of my son being propelled thru a windshield and it makes me testy. Thanks for listening.

[Will-i-am]

x-ray, in your pic I can't see the actual connection, but on my machine there are three pins with a space between two. The two pins together are on the '-' side and the single pin is on the '+' side. I can't figure out how a keyed connector would work there, maybe my CN180 is slightly different. There is a label marked 'key' opposite the space, but since the plug on the battery, and all the batteries I looked at, is too short to make it to both the '-' and '+' pins, I had to pull the thing apart, giving me two loose wires with metal clips on the ends that fit over the pins on the machine. Re the re-chargable aspect of it all, I assume that the draw on a charged rechargable battery would be slight enough to make it last a reasonably long time? The mechanism would be different, ie in a phone you hang it up after each call and the battery tops off, but in this case the battery will just sit and drain until you either see problems with the date/time, or if you have some kind of way to meter the charge on the battery.... not impossible... still it would be nice to have an easier way to open the Beast. I may fabricate some case clips so I don't have to constantly lay it on it's side and unscrew the dang screws all the time. Even with my trashed back I ought to be able to think about something. I am not sure about trying to swap to an ATX case because they all seem rather crowded and specialized inside.  I recently acquired an antique radio case and was toying with the idea of adapting it for my Beast. I could match the wood for a monitor base, or maybe a frame for an LCD screen that would match the style of the case, then have the keyboard/mouse flip out of the part of the case with the knobs, which would be just for display, maybe.... be kinda cute to make the power supply turn on with the original radio knob... good winter project.

[Will-i-am]

Brushed aluminum... nice. I've always had a liking for Art Deco and this radio case has some real potential. You knnow the old first TVs? The kind with the round screens that sat on top of the wooden case? Well that's the concept I am playing with. I may use an A2000 since I have 3 of them. I figure OS 1.3 in order to play all theose neat games my wife likes, or maybe the 'spare' A4000D because I have so much to do to repair it... busted psu etc... and an AGA machine would allow her to play games like Zool and James Pond, both of which she enjoyed a lot. So vis-a-vis the battery I think we have a plan of attack now and I will certainly post a record if it works okay. Of course now I'm looking at the phone charging unit and thinking about the room that's in the Beast... could I hack and slash it so that the recharge unit is wired into the computer in such a way as to keep the battery topped off, like when it was a phone? That would be interesting. Here's a typical Amiga solution: I have a radio that charges with a crank. Put the crank charger in line with the battery and use an old treadle sewing machine base so that as you use the computer you pump the treadle and charge the battery! Why didn't C= think of that? Maybe it was planned for the A5000T....

[Will-i-am]

Karlos wrote:
@Will-i-am

Any chance you could possibly arrange your text into some paragraphs? It's tiring to read long blocks of text that have no breaks in them and have to fish for the questions therein.

I'm sure you'll get more helpful replies that way.

Yup, I do ramble sometimes and thanks for the suggestion. My wife said the same thing about my blog. I need to adapt my writing style to the situation. The blog can be more stylized and rambly, but here I should try to be concise and clear. So I'll try to do better.
Still haven't charged the battery because I'm not sure the charger I have won't blow it up. I need to google to check on compatibility. Things are looking up, though. The Beast has everything else pretty much taken care of. The desktop A4000 is likewise getting rebuilt, adding the AmaxII board and the Spectrum EGS card.

[Will-i-am]

Well, here's how it turned out. I dug out an old cordless phone we had. Actually it was only a year old but it got tossed into the back room awhile back. I pulled it's battery out and plugged the wires on my battery onto the pins of the phone base, then plugged in the phone base for ten+ hours. Then I took the battery and glued on a strip of velcro to it and the other side of the velcro onto part of the frame of the Beast nearest the external battery pins. I velcroed the battery to the frame when the glue was dry and plugged the wires onto the external battery pins, being careful to put the wires on the correct pin. I set the date and time for the tower and then powered down, sat a minute for suspense and then fired up the tower and to my great delight the time and date was preserved, indicating that the battery was in the circuit and charged up! YAY.

So now when the battery dies back I can un-velcro it, pull the wires and charge it with a cordless phone base. This is a lot easier than soldering another coin clip onto the mobo, especially since I find them coin batteries hard to handle and read the tiny lettering on them. But then, I'm a beat up old man and many of the current crop of Amigans are young and have healthy eyes, right? Mostly.

Now the Beast is closed up and using an NEC2A bi-sync monitor for display. Sad and small, but only cost me $14 at a garage sale. The battery cost me $12. The Beast was a feebie, so I'm doing good! Thanks for the help...