eMate Battery Rebuild
While I was a little hesitant to do this project, I didn't want to spend about $100 on a rebuilt battery either. So following directions found on the net, I successfully rebuilt the battery pack for my Newton eMate 300.
Taking apart the original battery pack was straight forward enough. There are two sensor that you need to preserve for the rebuild that are a little tough to come off without wrecking them. Patience is simply the key here.
Re-assmbly with new batteries (the kind with soldering tabs) is easy, if you are half-way decent at soldering. I'm not. In fact I'd go so far as to say I'm bad at it. Hopefully with practice I will get better though as the savings in self-repair are tremendous. Soldering the two pairs of AA batterries together was the easy part. Soldering the thermal sensor and the wiring back on was not. For some reason I couldn't get the solder to stick to the batteries very well.
Once I got past that I packed the batteries back in the heat shrink wrap and stuffed it (quite literally) back into the battery pack "shell". To my surprise it went in quite easily. I plugged the battery connector into the eMate motherboard and almost instantly heard the reset power-on chime. I have to say I was surpised that it worked.
But work it did. I'm using the eMate now while the batteries are charging. So far no smoke or acrid smells! We'll see how well they take a charge and what kind of discharge rate I get out of them. Regardless, if I get any kind of decent life out of them then I'll be thrilled because the cost, $13!
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