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Vintage Laptop Battery Replaced with USB Power - How Hard Can It Be?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ส.ค. 2024
- In the late 80s, Andy played games and learned to program on the Toshiba T1100 Plus, an upgraded version of the world's first laptop PC. He recently found a similar one with the battery still intact, but of course not working. In this video, he explores the possibility of powering the computer with USB-C. After all, how hard could it be? bit.ly/376hK96
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#vintagecomputers #toshiba #toshibaT1100Plus #USBpower #USB-C
I feel like I'm watching an episode of Adrian's Digital Basement.
It would have worked if you had used thicker cable in your first attempt.
Those thin wires in cheap USB cables will cause a big voltage drop, hence the low battery light.
That's probably why they used double pairs from the battery to be able to supply sufficient with current..
You took the words right out of my mouth.
Interesting, I hadn't thought of that. However, USB power can be as little as 4.4 V (4.75 for "high-power" functions) according to the spec. Thicker gauge wire can lessen the voltage drop, but it can't increase an already low voltage. My final solution should work with any QC 3.0-compliant power supply.
@@andywest5773 the VAST difference in gauge of wire, and the fact that they included two wires on the battery originally should have been a clue. at 5:30 your bench psu shows that the computer draws 300 mA while idle. But this is not taking into account the CPU isnt working hard, and that the motors and heads of the floppy disks will require MANY times that. The original battery pack spec was around 4 amp hours IIRC. That USB cable was never going to handle it.
You should understand the relationship between voltage drop and current over thin wires. The problem here is not that the USB speck is a bit low for your laptop. Sure that *could be* a problem, if you had anything other than an assumption based on the battery spec to go on. But the problem here is that when the high current demand of the drive kicks on, the voltage sag over that tiny wire brings the voltage well below whatever the machine expects. And if we are really talking about USB spec here, you would still be SOL since USB spec is only capable of delivering 500mA over a USB 2.0 rated cable anyway. Just sitting idle, your laptop is %60 there already.
7:20 I think you need to secure the plastic insulation with the first crimping.
Yep, you're right. Good catch!
You could forego the entire buck/boost box by just putting a 10,000 - 22,000 uF electrolytic capacitor across the 5V power supply, close to the motherboard connection. The cap will act as a current reservoir and keep the voltage from dropping during the momentary current spikes caused by the floppy drive. Cheaper, simpler, more reliable, less clutter. A tip from an old electronics tech.
I just happened upon this video, not familiar with you or your channel. But I love DIY upgrades and modifications, and your presentation was very well communicated and photographed. So nice job!
Im confused, If there is a power jack on the back whats the point of this? DC power brick at 9 v is all you need.
Well if nothing else you could put a USB power bank on it and get super duper ultra mega huge hyper extreme overkill battery run times.. lol
Though for convenience, USB tends to be everywhere, no? And USB3 standard and above can delivery enough power.
if its like the ones i have, that is ONLY to charge the battery.
The 9V jack doesn't work without the battery and I had no interest in putting another battery in there. As somebody else mentioned, you could always use a power bank for portability. Also, this is a completely reversible mod so I'm not locked in to USB if I change my mind.
@@andywest5773 What about add a buck converter between the 9V input and battery connection, then get a 9V "QC trigger" cable?
Cool project! I would recommend covering the original power port to prevent some future retro enthusiast from blowing out your boost/buck converter or worse.
That's a great point. I'm going to do that now.
I was wondering about that too.
the two floppy drives are the best thing ever. I'd love to build something similar to this old beauty
7:08 Its ok to say "Ive never done this before / I dont have much experience with this" or "im not sure if this is right but.." some best practices in terminal crimping:
1: you only need to strip off a mm or two of insulation. Look to the terminal itself for guidance. The width of the wings that crimp the wire is the same width you should strip. Any more will interfere with the pin / wiper contact. On big chunky ones like this, it can interfere with good current transfer (heating / arcing). On smaller terminals, excess wire becomes a mechanical issue. For these reasons and more, I generally avoid these autostripper devices. Generally hate them all around.
2: Terminals should be clipped off the strip whenever possible rather than broken off. On big terminals its not a big deal. But on smaller ones the bent / torn strip interferes with insertion to the housing.
3 : as gabest4 said, you absolutely need to crimp the insulation by the second pair of wings. Both to assure strain relief as well as to avoid shorting (if the insulation is behind the terminal, there's a good chance the wire is exposed).
4: Save yourself a lot of heartache and do the pull test before inserting the terminal. I cant tell you how many times I though I had a good crimp, inserted it in the shell, and the wire came right back out. Removing an "empty" terminal is such a pain. Especially on small connectors.
The rating on the battery is the Nominal voltage and it is fun to see how many confuses this with charged voltage, A typical NICD battery will have about 1,5 when freshly charged meaning the voltage on this pack would been about 6 volts and 4,8 when completely discharged. add this onto the super thin USB cables voltage drop and it´s not strange at all why the Low voltage came on and I was even expecting it before it was even started. the pack has double thick wires for a reason and it is both to secure stable current with low voltage drop and add more connections to the power to minimize the risk of losing contact with the battery. in the second attempt you wire the booster directly to the thick wires and bypass the super thin USB cables and made it work because of less voltage drop and also compensation for that with the Buck-Boost. but to be frank it would probably even worked to just add a really big value capacitor across the connection in the first run to reduce the voltage drop during Peak currents
Was that the laptop chassis a common design in the 80s ?.. like the grid compass laptop design.. heard it cost an arm and leg.. like for military and space use...
That was my first computer! It had two - count them, two - floppy drives and a whopping 640k of ram. And you could run it for an hour off it’s battery. Wow. Cutting edge stuff.
Nice project!
Also Space Quest!!!!!!
Great video, I remember trying to do just this on some toy type RC cars.. lol
EDIT: it's a shame I don't got the little rock crawler with me, because then I could try that boost converter. For whatever reason it would work awesome when plugged into the wall but on a power bank it would die immediately when you give juice
I'm trying to solve a similar problem with my raspberry pi build....running off lipo battery and when it's under load I get low voltage indicated and sometimes a complete crash. PS thanks for the video!
The original T1100 (non plus) only had a single floppy drive, and the display was way worse - yours is golden....
I did a similar mod to a later T1000 laptop, in that I put a 12V to 5V converter in the battery pack holder, I got several more years of fun out of it. (I'm into amateur/ham radio, so heaps of 12V around, not so much 5V)
These old laptops serve really well as 'dumb terminals' assuming your into retro/ancient computing.
When you say no hard drive, was their an expansion port available of some kind (say SCSI or IDE) or was it just two floppies and you can't add anything else?
Very cool project.
I am trying to repair my own t1100p and I am really having troubles putting the machine back together. That black sheathe around the display refuses to fit into anywhere useful. How did you managed to get it back together?
Nice video…Question for you - I have the same T1100 Plus and for some reason it seems to only want to see the floppy drives both as 360k with read errors (also have installed a gotek with similar results, so it seems the machine is simply treating all drives as 360k). If I format a 720k DD disk in another known good machine/drive, the T1100 Plus seems to read them fine, but will only try to format as 360k. Have you experienced anything similar? I thought perhaps the bios needed to be set, but I cannot seem to find any Toshiba app that will run a configuration tool for it bios (I’ve tried all the CE setup disks I can find online). Do you happen to know how to configure the drive settings? (I’ve also verified the switch on the side is set to “PRT”, but also tried other positions).
What was the usb dc converter you used?
I have restored a T1100 plus (DOS 2.2 O/S) and it works fine but I needed a HDD so restored a T1200 (DOS 3.3) but haven't been able to download/get a DOS 3.3 O/S disk, it doesn't seem to offer full BIOS/COMMS port options when running DOS 2.2? Please please can you suggest where I can download/get the DOS 3.3 O/S
nice work and mod!
couldn't you remove the old power socket and mount the new power socket in its hole?
I have a Toshiba T1000 and i bought some new nicd cells. I will build a new battery pack. But in reallity your idea is better. Iam just trowing a new battery to a laptop i will turn on rarely and in a few years batterys will die again without any use.
I would love to have a copy of the game. Do you know where I can find it at?
Hi, I'm fixing same machine - my BIOS got corrupted somehow, i got version 004D , but it does not detect FDD and KEYBOARD with that one :( Maybe by any chance you have 004C bios on your motherboard and by any magical chance could send me an image of that ?
BIOS stands just next to CPU chip
Seems like a whole lot of work for something you will probably never use. The computing power of those old computers are dismal compared to any of the single board computers on the market for dirt cheap.
You seem to miss the whole point of a video like this. You think this guy's too dumb to realize his mid 80's clunkware is competitive with a current computer? Dude he's a tech enthusiast and was trying an experiment of how hard it would be to retrofit the power. What did you think this video was about?
could have replaced the battery with a modern powerbank
imagine trying to use that on your lap. oh my god 😂
There not that heavy, and they don't have fans trying to blow hot air into your ......
This is the old times so dont expect performance these where pretty cool back in the days also no loud fans that blow heat cause the cpu probbaly 186-386 does not get that hot
is there another method to do this?
Grab a cheap 5V DC-DC converter from ebay, pop that in the plastic battery box, then hook up an external power brick - that's basically what I did to get a later T1000 running off a 12V source.
You may even be able to squeeze a AC mains to 5V supply into there - I didn't go that way as I wanted to run mine on 12V as I have heaps of that floating around in my radio shack.
I am wondering why you didn't upgrade to lithium.
Only relevant if you want to go portable, he states early on its only going to be used on his desk.
@@paulstubbs7678 I get what you are saying, however I disagree that it is only relevant if you want to go mobile. There is already a nine volt charging input, so just use your battery as your voltage source rather than all the extra electronics. Yes it becomes portable again but that is just a beneficial side effect.
@@paulvild I did consider this originally, but as I understand it, you can't simply charge a LiPo battery with a Ni-Cd charger. There are different charging phases, etc., that would require extra circuitry anyway.
@@paulvild Back in the day, NiCad chargers were basically constant current trickle chargers, frequently requiring several hours to put a charge in, using no intelligence at all.
The power in from the charger could not directly run the laptop, as in if you disconnected the battery the laptop would not work - insufficient power.
The only way to directly power them (early Toshiba's) is via the internal battery connectors.
If you connected a 100A 9V supply to the charge input it still will not work, as that input goes via a constant current limiter (often just a 5W resistor). The laptop uses the battery to set/provide a stable-ish 4.8V supply that is then boosted to 5V (and 12V etc etc.)
You could take a feed directly from the 9V socket (ignoring the charge circuits) and feed that into a 5V reg - then into the laptop proper. It's a concept (external DC power) never envisioned by Toshiba at the time.
I hacked in a network card into one of these early Toshiba's, (T1000) it worked fine, I could log into a Netware server etc, however the combined current draw was much more than that set for the battery charger. With a full battery charge, and the charger still connected, it died after two hours.
Back in the day, a safe NiCad charge was deemed to be 1/10 of the C rating, a rate that the battery could withstand well after it was fully charged. In the T1000 case, 400mA, so everyone just fitted a resistor to give that current - less than the peek demand of the laptop (floppy seek etc)
it met the average current demands, so sustained wall use was ok, the battery picking up in normal times, and adding a bit more for disk reads etc.