From: Johan Vromans <jvromans_at_squirrel.nl>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 14:39:16 +0200

"Michael O'Quinn" <michael_at_oquinn.info> writes:

> Just be careful not to go above 12V. Also, if you decide to experiment, I
> may have damaged a Player by using a wall-wart rated 10.5V at 200ma.
> After leaving this on overnight, the charging behavior became very
> erratic. I don't know for sure if the unit was faulty to begin with, or
> if I blew it out. Fortunately the store exchanged it for another.

This 'charger' is, in fact, a precision controlled power supply I
designed and built myself. Experiments until now show that the unit
takes 2.9mA at 9V while charged, and around 160mA while charging. This
is with a spinning disk (while copying the disk to /dev/null). With a
quiet disk, it drops to a mere 130mA.

For reference, with the Archos supplied charger (brandless, made in
China, specified at 600mA at 9V) it takes 380mA at 10V. This is all
conforming to Q10 of http://rockbox.haxx.se/docs/battery-faq.html.

The charger I used yesterday (when I experienced the problems)
(brandless, 3/4.5/6/7.5/9V, 500mA) only produces 235mA at 8.75V, which
may be too less. However, with either charger it alternates between
charging and charged, which may indicate it can keep up with the load.
I started with fully charged batteries. After the experiment (reading
17Gb from the disk in 30 minutes) the battery indicator reads 9% full.

Anyway, the bottom line could be to use the Archos supplied charger
next to my PC, and the other charger next to my stereo.

-- Johan
Received on 2003-04-07