Lombard/Pismo Batteries

At this point it's likely the cells wouldn't even take a charge, seems like a real crapshoot.

I would look up what feedback the seller got from those batteries. The price seems high for batteries that should be well past use date, but I have working stock batteries from laptops older then a Pismo that work so you never know.

My experience has been hit or miss, but some of the old Apple li-ions have charged up just fine. I bought two NOS ones a few years back that are still pushing about 4200 mAh (about an hour and a half of normal runtime). Since this seller appears to be offering to take returns - that seems to take some of the risk out of it. The guy I bought from down in FL was offering no guarantees, so I got lucky there. Some other older ones that are "condition unknown" I pass on. And I also bought one $20 brick and don't need to do that again.

I have three OEM batteries; one doesn't charge, one does but lasts about five minutes, the other looks to last a few hours at the least.

Unused batteries have a tendency to work fairly well. Its like caps on motherboards. NOS boards rarely show any leakage because the caps have not been subjected to heat and use.

My 3400c battery still manages to hold its full charge, strangely enough. Maybe it wasnt used much. 

What are the charge cycle count characteristics of the different PowerBook Battery types across the generations?

From...probably the G3's until about 2008 it was roughly 300 cycles. Then they boosted it to 500 once they started sealing them inside, and somewhere around 2010-2011 they upped it to 1000 cycles. (all of those are "It'll still hold 80% after that many charge cycles", not "They'll be dead by then")

Today, Macs, iPads and the Watch are 1000 cycles, iPhones are 500, iPods are 300 still.

My 5th gen iPod classic is still going strong after 8+ years. Haven't babied the battery, either. Same with the shuffles. It's amazing how long some of them can last.

I've still got about 6-7 working Pismo batteries, ranging from ~2200 mAh to ~4500 mAh. Nice to have the option of being uunplugged for about an hour, and of course I can always pop two in if I want to go longer. Won't last forever, but at least for now, most are hanging in there.

When they start to fail, you can see the drop in fully charged mAh pretty precipitously. Every charge, they take a little less.

Is there still no way to recycle these batteries and fit them with new cells?

Lithium ion rebuilding is a touchy business still.

hardest thing is re-virginizing the controllers. 

It's probably doable, though....

....With special hardware/software, perhaps? Or perhaps not?

I know little to nothing about such things at this point.

c

It seems like the thing to do would be to rebuild a pack that still takes some charge, right?

Depends. If the circuit thinks the specs of the new batteries are out of spec it might just die on you.

I've got three Lombard/Pismo packs, one that lasts about 30 seconds, one that lasts 10 mins, and one that lasts about three hours. Might be willing to sacrifice the 10 minute one.

Why not sacrifice the 30 sec. one? Too far gone you think?

c

Take the pack that lasts a few hours, and clone its EEPROM onto the other two. Then change the cells. itll be fine afterwords. 

Also before you do this, make sure the good battery is charged all the way up. Then disassemble. That way the eeprom is left in a state of "full charge" 

Then clone eeproms, swap the cells. Let  the rebuilt batteries die and recharge. it will recalibrate itself. 

If anyone has the part number of the EEPROM/Controller that is used you could probably find a datasheet to rewrite the register values. 

My thought is to dump the ROM of a known good battery pack, then one of another that has been completely drained/used up. You could use a simple Hex editor and just compare the dumps side by side. If you then translated the Hex values to decimals that show a difference you could probably get an idea of which bits to change in order to reset the wear leveling settings. Or simply burn the ROM of the known good one to the abd one and replace the cells.

That likely wont work because each battery is uniquely serialized, etc... plus a ton of other calibration data thats going to vary. 

thats why I said just clone it. 

Mine lasts for about 45 minutes, but I know it is just a matter of time before it goes. Which is annoying, because I still enjoy using my Pismo for typing, I've yet to find something to best its ease of use.

Yes, they are pretty great. Love the keyboard feel. I like the iBooks too, but the Pismo just has an extra something and the screen size is just about perfect too. I wish some remanufactured batteries would become available at about a $40-50 price point. There were a lot more batteries on the 'Bay when I started collecting them in 2010 or so.

The Wallstreet batteries are readily available, but the Pismo and TiBook units are getting harder to find.

Why are the older Wallstreet batteries easier to get compared to the newer Lombard/Pismo and tiBook models?

I had one somewhat working battery for my Wallstreets (haven't charged it in a while) and a somewhat working  one for a TiBook. I use my later G4 laptops more as laptops and they have easier to find new batteries (of various quality).