Revive Your Tired Dremel Battery Pack

January 23, 2011 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

It turns out there’s nothing more than six Nickel Cadmium AA rechargeable batteries inside of that cordless Dremel battery pack. Yep, standard rechargeable AA’s that you can buy most anywhere, and now you can revive that aging battery pack by following [Stuuf’s] guide. Since you’re already at it, a few more bucks will yield a real upgrade by using the superior Nickel Metal Hydride batteries which should yield around three times as much use between charging. We totally understand having a battery pack, since the shape of the case is part of the handheld tool, and it should be easy to interchange the battery as one unit. We just wish that the battery pack had been designed to have the AA cells swapped out by the user once they had reached the end of the line.

Do you have other cordless tools in need of a pick-me-up? Check out this Makita battery pack repair hack for a point in the right direction.

[Thanks Bluewraith]

Elegant Wearable Computer

July 30, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 50 Comments

[Jason Statham] [Martin Magnusson] wrote in to tell us about his adventure in building a wearable computer. The device in its current state is a Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux tethered to an iPhone for internet. A bluetooth keyboard allows for input, while output is displayed on monocle-ized Myvu. And last but not least, the entire setup is powered by 4 AA batteries for 3 hours of life.

Its not as small as some of the wearable computers we’ve seen before, but if you wanted to whip out your own it sure takes a lot less soldering.

Thin Client As Robot Platform

July 26, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

geode

[Extra Ketchup] has a couple Neoware thin clients and thought they would make a good robotics platform. It’s a Geode based board that came with Windows CE. He built a small Gentoo system to fit on the 130MB solid state drive. He likes the idea of using it as a platform because the board has serial, parallel, and USB support. The best part is shown above; it can run off of just 4 AA’s.

Xbox 360 Battery Pack Teardown

October 4, 2008 by Eliot 26 Comments

Reader, [Fox9p3400], opened up an Xbox 360 controller battery pack so we could all see what goes into one. It contains two Sanyo 2100mAh NiMH AA rechargeables (Model HR-3U 1.2V). In addition to that, there is an Atmel microcontroller (not pictured) and the copper temperature probe you can see above. He has more pictures on Photobucket.