Battery Replacements After The Apocalypse

[neomaster321365]

Excuse my thread title. I know you can order an extra battery or three from Open Pandora, but I was wondering if there was some sort of generic battery one could buy that would work as a replacement battery, or if the battery is custom made. Pertaining to the thread title, let's say we're all living in a post-apocalyptic world, Open Pandora Ltd. long gone, and all those with access to those batteries otherwise incapacitated. Would one then have any chance of, wandering around in this hypothetical barren wasteland of a brave new world, coming upon a shady shack full of elusive electronics, and among the discarded treasures, find a battery that would power your now twenty year old handheld? Granted you'd be spending quite the chunk of bottle caps on your little purchase from an, in all probability, extremely shady and on occasion cannibalistic vendor, but ignoring that hypothetical...

Is there any sort of generic battery that Open Pandora stamped there logo on, or is it a custom rectangle of portable power?

 

[Consequence_9]

it's custom, and silliness aside i wouldn't screw around with batteries (trying to get one to work with something it's not rated for), the results can be... explosive. So order up! [while you can] ;]

 

[gruso]

In the event of an apocalypse I'd probably be a little less fussy about how neat/compact it is. An external 5V battery connected to the DC inlet would be pretty easy to arrange.

 

[fischju2000]

I don't think the Pandora can run without a battery, even given DC input, can it?

 

[Vitel]

I don't think the Pandora can run without a battery, even given DC input, can it?

http://pandorawiki.org/FAQ#Will_it_be_able_to_run_from_the_AC_Adaptor_alone.2C_without_a_battery_connected.3F

 

[neomaster321365]

Well I certainly appreciate the response! Hopefully if they're still going strong in a couple of years, or at least maybe they have a couple lying around, I'll order another battery and stick it in my fridge. Thank you.

 

[strider_mt2k]

I think learning about electrical power systems will allow you to adapt what have you to what have you given the resources and the time.

Not to mention the radical shift in your priorities that will leave you forgetting about playing video games for more important tasks, like survival.

Good luck with that, either way.

 

[Vlynndar]

I think learning about electrical power systems will allow you to adapt what have you to what have you given the resources and the time.

Not to mention the radical shift in your priorities that will leave you forgetting about playing video games for more important tasks, like survival.

Good luck with that, either way.

Oh, you can just use the Pandora to look up some tutorials and walkthroughs online.

 

[mindlord]

My post-apocolyptic survival scenario includes a Pandora with Wikipedia, and various survival handbook PDFs on a SD card.

 

[strider_mt2k]

So much for my plan to use it as a weight for my weighted club for fending off the horde.

 

[zounder1]

Well I certainly appreciate the response! Hopefully if they're still going strong in a couple of years, or at least maybe they have a couple lying around, I'll order another battery and stick it in my fridge. Thank you.

Just don't leave it fully charged or it will deteriorate just like the one being used day to day. A LiIon battery being put away for storage should ideally be at most 50% fully charged to ensure the battery does not chemically self destruct. A fully charged LiIon battery will start to chemically self-destruct when fully charged even if you do not use it.

 

[neomaster321365]

Well I certainly appreciate the response! Hopefully if they're still going strong in a couple of years, or at least maybe they have a couple lying around, I'll order another battery and stick it in my fridge. Thank you.

Just don't leave it fully charged or it will deteriorate just like the one being used day to day. A LiIon battery being put away for storage should ideally be at most 50% fully charged to ensure the battery does not chemically self destruct. A fully charged LiIon battery will start to chemically self-destruct when fully charged even if you do not use it.

Aye aye! Thank you for the tip. And humorous responses from the rest.

 

[pelrun]

They'll deteriorate anyway. You can't avoid it, you can only pick the conditions where it is slowed down.

OP's been around for a couple of years without actually releasing the Pandora; I bloody well expect them to be around for at least a few years afterwards. In any case, as long as craigix doesn't fall off any particularly high roofs, we can always track him down and shake him until a few more batteries fall out.

 

[laurencevde]

If I'm not entirely mistaken, the battery-pack contains multiple, fairly standard, LiPo-cells, and a charging/protection/info-circuit. If you manage to find compatible cells somewhere, or "redesign" the charging-circuit based around the cells you can get, then yes, you could replace them with a DIY. I believe the needed documentation for doing so(interface between pandora and battery) will be publicly available. Any aftermarket-battery-company should be able to build one.
Furthermore, hooking up an external battery-pack through USB will also work.

 

[neomaster321365]

Even more extremely useful information. And even with all this, as I understand it, the Pandora *should* be able to run on AC power alone, without a battery pack in it. So if one of us really, really wants to use our Pandora twenty years from now, we could still plug it in. Portability's trashed though.

 

[WhiteBat]

Lithium-ion polymer is just a giant stick of polymer wrapped in foil or something, which can be shaped into rectangles, cylinders, triangles etc.
Most of the time Lithium-ion polymer is also in a hard case, so you don't bend it.
The Pandora has a Lithium-ion polymer battery without a hard case, so you can fit more battery capacity for the space.
The Pandora requires a battery installed to turn on IIRC. Even if it is dead or wont hold ANY charge, you still need it. I think it needs to just complete the circuit. Same for most cell phones.

edit: hopefully in 20 years OP will have already released the specs so we can custom order our own batteries, like a group buy. but will you seriously be using the pandora in 20 years?
what were you guys using 10 years ago?

 

[Monk]

Even more extremely useful information. And even with all this, as I understand it, the Pandora *should* be able to run on AC power alone, without a battery pack in it. So if one of us really, really wants to use our Pandora twenty years from now, we could still plug it in. Portability's trashed though.

Not so! Or, at least, not necessarily. Let's assume you can get a 5V battery supply of some kind, and that the Pandora can run without a battery (as with most things, this has not been confirmed or denied definitively by OpenPandora and is STILL up in the air at present). In that case all you need is a 5V supply plugged into the DC in, right? Well, in the scenario I have posited you have an empty battery compartment - put a 5V battery of the future in there and drill a small hole fo the lead to come out an plug into the DC in (you could be even tidier if you were willing to open the case up and make the conenction internally). Unless batteries get significantly better in futur e(which they might!) you probably wouldn't have the same weight/batterylife combo, but you would still be portable.

I'm a little more concerned about the proprietary nature of the battery - all OpenPandora have to do to make the Pandora "obsolete" is to stop making batteries. The market could well be small enough to make other battery makers not consider Pandora Batteries commercially viable, which would make each of us getting our own batteries custom made... prohibitively expensive. I preferred it when the Pandora was supposed to operate off of standard commercially-available batteries. But that ship has sailed (and improved runtime replaced it).

 

[mali]

Let's assume you can get a 5V battery supply of some kind, and that the Pandora can run without a battery (as with most things, this has not been confirmed or denied definitively by OpenPandora and is STILL up in the air at present).

I'd really like a definite confirmation, if it works or not. Last thing I know, before I was away for a few months, is that one of the board revisions specifically removed the necessity of a battery to be present. A recent comment of Wizardstan(which I trust, because he usually has a good memory regarding that stuff) suggested that a battery has to be present.

 

[Vlynndar]

I'm a little more concerned about the proprietary nature of the battery - all OpenPandora have to do to make the Pandora "obsolete" is to stop making batteries. The market could well be small enough to make other battery makers not consider Pandora Batteries commercially viable, which would make each of us getting our own batteries custom made...

And imagine having to search the internet for 'Pandora Battery'.

And I also recall someone trustworthy posting that there had to be a battery present.

 

[Monk]

I'd really like a definite confirmation, if it works or not. Last thing I know, before I was away for a few months, is that one of the board revisions specifically removed the necessity of a battery to be present. A recent comment of Wizardstan(which I trust, because he usually has a good memory regarding that stuff) suggested that a battery has to be present.

As would I - it's make me feel a lot happier, personally... and yes, Stan's usually quite good at being right. It's not often that I hope he's wrong, or simply outdated - but this time I hope that he's quoting what he read correctly, but that the information is indeed no longer relevant or correct. I hate proprietary components, I really do - sometimes you really need them to do a given job at a given price/size/speed/convenience/whatever, but they can suddenly become an anchor round your neck