Fujitsu Pencentra 200 battery pinout?

[rotarymike]

Hi all. I picked up a few PC200's for a song (2 transflective and 2 reflective). They work fine with a laptop power supply, but they didn't come with batteries. The batteries are now impossible to get, or the ebay seller wants over 10x what I paid for the tablet.

I know it's a 10.8v LiOn cell, and the fujitsu interface is 10 pins:
1 long
2-9 short
plastic spacer
10 long

looking at pics, seems to be the common fujitsu battery connector. Alas, even dogpile couldn't find me a pinout.

I've got 12V on my mini-mill that I'd like to use to power one of these beasties (DIY-DRO) so I'm looking for a way to fool the thing into thinking there's a battery there.

Anyone have any info I can use?

mike AT rotarymike DOT com

[Janitor Tzap]

Hey there Mike,

I've done some hunting for the batteries on the web as well.
Came up with nothing.

Can you go back to the original owner, and see if he still has the old battery pack?

Otherwise start hitting the Surplus stores, Thrift Stores, Garage Sales, Yard Sales, Hamfests, Computer Sales, Auctions,
and see if you can find one that still has the battery with it.

Then once you have the battery.{Even if it is probably dead}
Carefully open it up, and check out how it is wired up inside.
Please Note: Most of these Laptop batteries have Thermal protection devices.
Plus maybe even regulator circuits built into the Battery Packs.
So when you rebuild the Battery Pack.
Make sure these items are not damaged when put in new cells,
And are placed back into there original positions in the Battery Pack.
The new cells should be same type, size, voltage, and amperage.

You can then use the knowledge you gained from rebuilding the one Battery Pack.
To construct another Battery Pack.{Hopefully}

Sorry, I can't give you better information.
Good luck.


Signed: Janitor Tzap

[rotarymike]

They were sold at auction by a business liquidator, they have ZERO information on them. No batteries.

Around here (Charleston, SC), there are no surplus stores, thrift Stores, hamfests, computer sales, etc that sell this sort of stuff. I miss where I lived in Japan, I had three used electronics stores and maybe 20 bit-n-piece stores within the city.

I've got no problems rebuilding a batt if I can find one... really, all I need is the connector. I'm going to supply it a regulated 10.8V from my mill.

Really, a pinout for any Fujitsu computing battery should work.

Mike

[CeaSaR]

So far, all I have been able to find is external batteries and AC power supplies.
1 thing I did find was a place called Scanalyst.com / AIS that has a phone #
and email at the bottom of their page for the "200". They might be able to help
you with your quest. Website

BTW, here is the user's guide from Fujitsu: User's Guide PDF.
Page 33 of the PDF (labeled page 21 of the user's guide) says that the battery
can be charged either in the tablet or in an external charger. Maybe you could
find something on that.

PAYDIRT! I found a site that says you can order a battery from them: Battery.
It's worth a shot.

CeaSaR

BTW, I use Yahoo! Search most of the time to find things on the web. I'll even
use MSN search and Altavista before I use Google. Google is a bit too disorganized for me.

[Janitor Tzap]

PAYDIRT! I found a site that says you can order a battery from them: Battery.
It's worth a shot.

CeaSaR

Nice going there CeaSar.

Ok, Mike, I'm getting you.

Is it possible to get a Picture of the connector on the Laptop posted here?
That would really help.

What do you mean you don't have those kind of sales, or stores around?!?
Didn't you just say:

They were sold at auction by a business liquidator.

You have keep going to these sort of auctions.
And as check out Yard Sales and Garage Sales.
I've found an Old 20" Hitachi Monitor at a Garage Sale for $30.
{I talked him down too $25}

As for HamFests...
There's one coming up on May 2 at:
Spartanburg, SC
Piedmont Interstate Fairgrounds
575 Fairgrounds Road
http://www.upstatehamfest.org

There are lots of places to look, you just have too find them.


Signed: Janitor Tzap

[rotarymike]

By auction, I meant Ebay. Problem is, I'm into the 4 PC200s for $30 for the set. $100 for a battery for one of them is pretty steep and right now, outside my experimenter budget.

I have figured out that the lone long pin is negative, and the other long pin is positive. I managed to get it going with an old Thinkpad battery (10.8V LiON 4400mAH). Without the smart circuitry hooked up, I'm worried about it overcharging though, and that's bad juju with lithium ion cells.

Pic here:

The round thing is a penny for size comparison. Sorry the camera sucks - wife has the good camera hidden somewhere

The thing about hamfests/etc is distance v. time. Spartanburg is a good 3 hours away; that makes a hamfest by necessity a daytrip. I can't afford that much time away - in theory I'm in grad school and that has a heavy workload

Thanks everyone for comments so far. N&V has always helped keep my sanity when working on a project

[Janitor Tzap]

Hey, an auction is auction.
Just keep an eye out for batteries there, or on craigslist,
or any of the other online auction sites.

Hmm......
I thought maybe the photo would show something more.

Well....
You do have 4 of these.
Pick the worst one of the bunch, and use it as a sacrificial lamb for the others.
Crack open the case and start poking around.

If your only going to be running it off of your mini-mill.
Just make up a regulator circuit for 10.8Vdc, off of the 12Vdc.
But make sure the amperage is high enough to power the Laptop.
The 4400ma Thinkpad battery maybe higher than what it really needs to operate.
But it shouldn't of hurt it either.

I'd bet only half of those pins actually have connections to them.

Good Luck!


Signed: Janitor Tzap

[steveD]

I've done some work on these batteries and there are some pins common to all LION smart batteries. Obviously there is power and ground which are usually the two end pins. Next is the SMBus ( I2C) for communication to the BMU ( Battery Management Unit ). Then there will be a battery present and system present pins. Some manufactures have a separate thermal pin to either indicate a thermal alarm or a 1 wire bus for temperature measurements. There will sometimes be an general alarm pin as well that might be tied to the system interrupt. I recommend looking at the smart battery forum to learn more about this.

http://sbs-forum.org/

TI is one of the biggest suppliers of BMU or Gas Gauge chips as some people call them so browsing their web site will provide a lot of information of smart battery technology.

Opening a pack without destroying it is tough as they are usually sonic welded together. If if you did manage to open one up and replace the cells getting the BMU to run again is going to be very hard to do...

[Janitor Tzap]

TI is one of the biggest suppliers of BMU or Gas Gauge chips as some people call them so browsing their web site will provide a lot of information of smart battery technology.

Opening a pack without destroying it is tough as they are usually sonic welded together. If if you did manage to open one up and replace the cells getting the BMU to run again is going to be very hard to do...

Oh man, that stinks!

Some of the battery re-builders must of figured out how to reset those chips,
without having to replace them.

It's just like the ink cartridges that have chips in them.
Except some of the ink sellers have come up with a way to reset them.


Signed: Janitor tzap

[psycho]

I have a Pencentra 130. I wonder if it's the same battery? The image you posted is not there for me for some reason. When I got this, I got a charger and a kinda dock thing that will also (supposedly) charge the battery.

I don't remember where I got it but it was an ad in N&V about a year ago. They might have spare batteries laying around.

Psycho

[rotarymike]

Well, I won an auction for a used Stylistic LT battery, which may or may not physically fit. BUT, it does have the proper connection, so I can disassemble it and start tinkering.

The PC-200 innards offered no help - they are incredibly compact, and the battery connector is right onto the motherboard and hard to get to any test points, even with the mobo out of the case. I get varying resistance between all the pins.

From what I've seen, it takes some hardware hacking but the BMU chips can be reset: This Page talks about building an i2c - parallel port interface to talk to the chip via bit-banging. Looks promising.

The stock battery is only 1.3AH so there's not a whole lot of current there; some of that is extra power to run PCMCIA devices. I've got a wireless-B card, network card, SCSI card, and a USB 2.0 card to work in it, all of which sink some current. All I'll (probably) have in it on the mill is a CF-PCMCIA card to hold my DRO programs etc. I guess I need to hook my thinkpad battery up again, borrow a current-measuring meter (I love my Fluke 12, but it's limited) and see how much it actually draws.

As for the sacrificial lamp idea, that's originally why I got 4 of them. They were all 'bad for parts only' supposedly... so I was pleasantly surprised when all 4 boot and run, and the only problems are that one has an iffy touchscreen (which might have been caused by my not reseating a cable fully upon reassembly).

[steveD]

Here are some links to TIs battery information.

http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/techdo ... e=slua421a

http://focus-webapps.ti.com/general/doc ... rm=SLUA372

[CeaSaR]

Are you trying to use a battery in tandem with the 12V from the mill or are you
just going to supply the Reg'd 10.8V directly? If the latter, all you would (most
likely) need would be the + and - connections. Am I on the right track?

CeaSaR

[rotarymike]

I'd like to use a battery in tandem, so that the ram doesn't dump every time I shut the mill down. Otherwise I'd just wire ~11VDC to the voltage pins.

We'll see what I get with this battery I've bought.

[rotarymike]

The battery is for the Stylistic LT, C-500 and P-600s. 3400 MAh and it fits like a charm... now to just find 3-4 more for less than $120 each (I paid $20 for this one)

At this point, I've found a cheap travel adapter that takes 12V in and puts out 16VDC, which will run the palmtop just fine. The battery is mostly to prevent the whole thing dumping all my programming when the power is off.