• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

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    Lithium Polymer battery for PB100 (and maybe portable)

    Ah excellent, I've found your eBay store. Would you be so kind as to explain in technical terms why the laptop shuts down when you remove the power adapter (if not fully charged)? Because the one I made with a $2 aliexpress BMS doesn't have that problem, but then neither does it charge the...
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    HDI-20 to IDC-20 adapter for use with Floppy Emu

    Maybe the logic board needs another wash, maybe something more aggressive this time. Last time just used alcohol and a toothbrush. Tempted to use the dishwasher this time followed by an isopropanol soak. I suspect the whole logic board would fit in my dehydrator... Do you know how to identify...
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    Lithium Polymer battery for PB100 (and maybe portable)

    This is cool. I made a LiPo battery for my PowerBook 100 too but I just used a BMS circuit from Aliexpress to regulate the charging of the cells. Managed to cram it all into a 3d printed battery case. It's crude but it works well enough. I love what you've done though, vastly more sophisticated...
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    HDI-20 to IDC-20 adapter for use with Floppy Emu

    No because it works with 800k floppy images. I think maybe it's a fault with the logic board somewhere because it had issues with physical floppies too - which I had attributed to the floppy drives or the floppies themselves being too old. Perhaps I need to check over my recapping job.
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    HDI-20 to IDC-20 adapter for use with Floppy Emu

    Hi all, I cannibalised an HDI-20 floppy drive and created an adapter for my Floppy Emu using an IDC-20 breakout board. Here's a photo: I'm having the weirdest problem though: it can only mount the 800kb and 400kb disk images, not the 1.44mb images. The HD20 hard drive image mounts fine, but...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    I'm aware that this has become something of a monologue but I wonder if a cheap and sensible solution might not be to put a powerbank in the battery bay, then I could just remove it and charge it by USB. The laptop could probably even charge the powerbank as modern powerbanks can both charge and...
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    Recovering PB100 batteries

    Based on my experience of hacking open a Powerbook 100 battery to remove all the guts and the research I've been doing this evening, this battery is clearly an absorbent glass mat type battery. From what I've read tonight you're not really supposed to flood one of these batteries with distilled...
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    Powerbook 100 - DC power socket assembly missing a component

    Nah I got it working in the end, and unfortunately my second PB100 is missing that cable completely.
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    Recovering PB100 batteries

    Hi all, sorry to dredge up an old topic but I'm trying to recover a dead Powerbook 100 battery with only limited success. It looks like Sony made a few slim lead-acid batteries in the 1980s such as the 6v 1000mAh BP-3 Discman battery and this was clearly where the inspiration for the Powerbook...
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    How to power up PowerBook 100 w/o keyboard!

    Good one. I'll be doing another PB100 soon and will be more rigorous this time, now that the initial breathless excitement of getting one working has been replaced by a strong desire to do it right. I haven't got around to doing the daughterboard cap or the trackball caps on mine yet but I'll...
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    How to power up PowerBook 100 w/o keyboard!

    That's a lovely heap of Powerbook 100s you have there! It's a great machine and I have fond memories of it from when I was a child which is why I'm plugging away with my own PB100 restoration project. I thought mine was totally fixed but I managed to get it back into BSOD mode by fiddling a bit...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    Well, with 6 x AAA NiMh batteries, which I incorrectly described in my previous post as Ni-Cad, the battery works perfectly. So 5 x AAA NiMh batteries simply couldn't provide a high enough voltage under load. With no load the voltage of this pack of 6 cells is 8V which is a tad high, however as...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    Hi everyone, it seems to be working now but the plot thickens! The other day I found there was a capacitor that had fallen off from its perch atop some kind of mysterious regulator thing near the DC jack so I soldered it back on (I created another thread about it because it wasn't...
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    Powerbook 100 - DC power socket assembly missing a component

    Good news! Turns out I don't empty the bin nearly as often as I thought I did. Please excuse the terrible photo of this tiny thing - 5mm long, 4mm wide and 2mm high. Edit: It reads 0.94 uF so I guess it definitely is a capacitor. If anyone has any ideas as to what this part of the circuit does...
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    Powerbook 100 - DC power socket assembly missing a component

    Hi there, I have two Powerbook 100s. My plan is to make one really good one out of these two old beauties. I recapped one of them but it won't boot off my rebuilt battery. I have been suspicious of the appearance of the DC power socket for some time and then today while browsing online looking...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    Hmm so this doesn’t appear to have fixed the problem. I can now read 6.73v across the battery terminals on the logic board with my 5 x AAA cells attached but it still won’t boot without the mains power adapter, and if I attach my benchtop power supply to the dummy battery it delivers zero...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    Anyway good news for anyone following this saga - sat down with a multimeter to investigate tonight and it was actually a mechanical problem. My disembowelled dummy battery wasn’t making contact with the positive and negative terminals at the same time - only one or the other depending on which...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    I understood you - it just strikes me that you would have to either have a cable travelling from the battery bay to the outside of the computer and snaking round the back to the power plug... or you’d have to cobble together some means of switching between the “Internal thinpack” and the mains...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    Further on that subject, @Trash80toHP_Mini, the sensor mechanism is just a switch that gets pressed when the battery gets shoved in... presumably the laptop measures the voltage of the battery but I don't see how that would make a difference. Maybe I'll scrutinise that Macintosh portable thread...
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    Powerbook 100 Battery Rebuild

    That is a good idea although you would need some means of turning off the internal battery to allow you to run off mains when desired. Thing is this problem does have a solution and it will be a logical one, it's just a question of figuring it out. Unfortunately one would need a non-dead PB100...
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