Recent content by mustagcoupe

Did you set the operating system in the startup disk control panel. If you don't do that or if the pram battery is dead it won't remember where the operating system is and will spend a while on the question mark folder until it finds the OS and boots.

Thick black should be shield which is connected to the metal shell around the tip of the connector. It should be tied to negative.

Yes but it's unclear why it is like that. Do they actually need to be separate 16v rails or did apple just design the power supply with 2 separate 2amp 16v rails because it was cheaper and easier than building 1x 4 amp at the time. None of us has a working battery to see how it charges with...

Fizzbinn and I both connected vbatt and vmain to 16v so the battery charging circuit has power. But neither one of us has a working battery so see if it will charge with vbatt and vmain tied together. It's unclear if the battery charging circuit actually has to be separated to charge or if apple...

What kind of box is that. That's an amazingly clean job. I also don't have a working battery to see if it still charges. I don't know if there's a legitimate reason why apple separated them or if it was just cheaper to build the power supply as 2x 2amp vs 1x 4amp at that time.

Yes. There is a diagram in an earlier post. I think you should be able to leave the vbatt wire disconnected. Just cover the wire with heat shrink or something so it doesn't short out. On my adapter I hooked vbatt and vmain together and soldered them to 16v on the barrel jack. I don't have a...

That is exactly the jack I used for my 500 series adapter. Also pulled from a dead T20 series. I trimmed down the plastic and filed the corners so I was able to stretch out 3/8 inch heat shrink tubing to fit over it. I put 2 zip ties on the cord to give the large heat shrink something to grab...

The most common size was and probably still is 5.5 x 2.5mm. 5.5mm shell and 2.5mm pin. Make sure you get the heavy duty jacks, the standard cheapo kind is a bit flimsy for the 3+ amps a large laptop can draw. I usually take mine out of dead laptops because they're high quality and free. Also if...

If you put all the voltage regulators in one box you could use a different size barrel jack for each voltage. Then you wouldn't have to worry about voltage switching and it would be impossible to accidentally connect a laptop to the wrong voltage. I found out female Dupont wires like they use...

I hadn't noticed that the mac laptops with the headphone style power jack were 24v, I assumed they were 18v like the magsafe laptops. Never noticed the 3 pin dells being 20v either. My adapters for them are in good shape so I never looked that closely at them. I guess I've been lucky that almost...

The variable voltage power supply seems unnecessary. Pretty much all laptops use either 16v or 18.5v, most of them with a 5.5 x 2.5mm barrel jack. So if you build a cable or adapter from 5.5mm barrel jack to each non standard jack you'll probably only need 2 power bricks. My preference is the...

The adapter for my 520c was becoming unreliable and would sometimes fail to power up the laptop. I cut the cord off and soldered it to a barrel jack salvaged from a dead pc laptop and sealed it with heat shrink tubing. This way I can use any standard unmodified PC laptop power brick supplying...

A while back I got a PowerBook 520c that worked but the screen plastics were in terrible shape and the screen didn't always work properly which made it no fun to use. I decided to remove the screen and convert it into a halftop using an external monitor. I could not find any information on if...

I lifted the write protect pin on the locked flash chip on the diamond card and was able to program it to the Mac firmware using DOS atiflash. I found a reduced firmware that already had the GPU and memory clocks set to 150mhz so I used that one. So far it seems to be working but I can't run the...

The locked flash chip on the diamond card is an atmel 25f512, it does have a write protect pin on the chip. I probed around with a multimeter and the write protect pin is connected to a bunch of other random pads but it doesn't seem to be true ground. Since there doesn't seem to be a resistor I...