[Ham-Mac] Using external battery to power a PowerBook

[Dick Rucker]

on 1/25/04 2:20 PM, Phil Stripling at philip@civex.com wrote:

> Is there a way to tell if your internal battery is being recharged along
> with continuing to power the computer? I know our iBook knows when it's
> got the recharger plugged in, but I have no idea how the electronics
> handle the incoming power vis-a-vis recharging the internal battery and
> providing power to the computer.

When the power adapter is plugged in, there's a symbol of a battery with a
lightning flash in its middle; the current battery charge percentage is
shown in ().  Just now, battery was about 1/2 charged (45%).

When nothing is plugged into the external power jack, the flash changes to a
horizontal bar showing the amount of charge visually; the percent of charge
is shown in (45%).

When my two gel cells providing 24 vdc are plugged into the the external
power jack, the symbol in the center of the battery symbol reverts to the
lightning flash.  The current flowing towards the power jack is measured at
25 milliamps, hardly what one would expect for a battery that is only
half-charged.

I see no way to determine if the battery is being charged except to leave an
external power source plugged in for a while and see how the %charge reading
changes.  Two cases:

1.  I did that for about 20 minutes with the computer in sleep and my gel
cells providing external power; the result was no change in the %charge.

2.  When I did the same thing with the external power adapter, the %charge
increased to 52%.

Looks to me like the computer battery does not want to accept a reasonable
charging current from my gel cells.

Dick, KM4ML