[Milsurplus] [ARC5] Batteries....

[Hubert Miller]

>From: Brian Clarke 
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2023 5:46 PM

Hello Hue,
I feel your anger. I meet the same problem quite often. Manufacturers and their marketing minions are only concerned with sales volume; so, they design a device they hope you'll throw away when the battery fails and immediately buy a replacement. Bugger that for a game of tin soldiers.
The AVO meter firm had a different approach - under a 2-screw captive plate, you could access and change the batteries.
RS Components offers a small 9 V battery holder that involves your cutting a hole in the side of the case. You can then slide the battery in and out on a clip-in tray. In some equipment, I have installed a blinking LED to remind me when equipment is on. In other cases, I have added a push-button switch to activate a Zener-biased LED to monitor remaining battery life.
>73 de Brian, VK2GCE

I actually thought of an audio alarm, like a beep that goes off so often on your smoke detector. That's a whole other project. It would have to sample periodically and only draw minimal current 
when it was sampling. Then maybe if needed a "joule thief" type voltage boost to drive a piezo device. An LED wouldn't do it for me, because my smaller test things DVOMs, dippy meters and
such mostly reside inside a trunk, in the dark, where the batteries do their bad thing.
-Hue Miller