The tip shop is kind (PowerBook 520c! My first 500 series!)

[LCGuy]

So today Mum and I took another run out to the tip shop, which is just near the uni. And I hit paydirt again. As I'm walking towards the electrical section, the first thing I see is an old laptop of some kind. I assume its an old Pentium of some sort, but I thought I'd have a look anyway. Then I saw the side of it - it was a 500 series of some sort! I open it up, and its a 520c. I ask the guy how much he wants for it. 5 bucks! Its in poor shape, dirty as all Hell, and has a hole in the display case, in the lid near the sleep LED, and there's no power adaptor, but even so, still worth it, even just for the SCSI HDD trapped inside it, hoping that it works.

I've tried a bootup from the battery, to no avail, but i'll take that with a grain of salt, given that at the moment its only power source is a 14 year old (Un)"Intelligent" battery. Anyone up for sharing the power requirements and pinouts for the 500 series PBs? It'd be sweet to see if i could get this baby up.

 

[Bunsen]

Yay tip shops! They are intermittently awesome, huh?

 

[LCGuy]

They are indeed...some of the time, at least.

 

[Byrd]

Nice find LCGuy - must have been pretty exciting to finally find a decent portable in your neck of the woods! A while back I found a 5x0 charger at a car boot sale for 50c, and posted it to iMac600. They are around - perhaps try Mactalk? I had about five 5x0s for a while, all donated apart from a 540PPC 100Mhz and my favourite 540PPC 167Mhz with Rev c card cage.

Anyhow, I have a 5x0 charger right on my desk! It says:

output Vmain 16V --- 1.5A

output vbatt 16V --- 1.0A

autoranging input 200 - 240V ~ 0.75A

JB

 

[LCGuy]

Awesome, thank you very much, Byrd. I'm thinking...I know that the PB500 series have two power inputs (hence 4 pins) so that they can charge two batteries at the same time. And as luck would have it, I actually have a 16 volt adaptor kicking around that i'm fairly sure puts out the right amount of juice. All I need now is to find the pinouts so I can find out which pin does what... [}] ]'> (yeah, I checked the devnote, which has nothing ) But yeah...I'll try MacTalk...there's maybe two people from around my area on there, but its worth a shot.

 

[Bunsen]

The naming of the two 16V outputs suggests that -one- is for running the laptop, and the other is for charging the battery/ies.

Seeing as those batteries are almost universally dead, try getting 16V into the Vmain pin and see if it boots.

Have you tried pinouts.ru ?

 

[LCGuy]

Thats what I've been thinking too. The thing is though...which pins are for Vmain...that is the question. I don't want to blow up a machien I never even knew.

 

[Bunsen]

Your best bet might be if someone here could buzz the pins in their own PS with a voltmeter. Then at least you'd know which is GND and +. Then there's only two guesses to go ... which + is Vmain, and which is Vbatt

 

[wally]

Place the PB5xx flat on a table in normal orientation, screen open and up, but facing away from you so you can see the rear connections. With the negative of an ohmmeter connected to the exposed ground metal around the serial, ADB, or ethernet connections measure low range ohms to the power connector bottom two male pins. The bottom one farthest to the left is pin 3 and is connected directly to ground at the logic board. The bottom one closer to the serial port is pin 4; it is not clear if this has a function as I cannot measure it going anywhere obvious. Using the AC power adapter pin 4 is at 0 V, but the 12V auto adapter does not connect to it at all (missing female connector metal in position 4). The upper left side pin above 3 is pin 2, and the remaining upper right side pin above pin 4 is pin 1, as numbered on the logic board soldermask, as viewed from the rear of the PB5xx. Pins 2 and 1 each get +16V from my AC adapter and +14.2V from my auto adapter, with respect to ground pin 3. I'll leave it to you to figure which is main vs battery power. I do not know what happens if you power one but not the other, nor whether it is ok to power both tied together from a single higher amp supply, but at least here is a guide to the polarity part of the puzzle.