Fallingwater
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jul 31, 2006
- Posts
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- 10
How do you fix a Cowon iAudio 7 with a busted LiPo battery (it actually had a hole in it) without an identical replacement, and retaining the spectacular battery life?
Like this:
(the ugly volume switches are part of another repair - the previous owner had broken the original ones and removed the plastic cover on top of them, so I just cut the button openings wide open and glued in standard TAC switches)
Those are two 2 amp-hour 18650 LiIon cells connected in parallel, giving an equivalent capacity of approximately 4 Ah. Considering that current draw while playing Ogg Vorbis is extremely small (about 25 mA), the big battery ought to be enough to run the player for almost a week - continuously! Hence the "infinity" in the name
And it's not that much bigger compared to the original; it's no longer easily pocketable in pants, but I never put my player in my pants pockets anyway, so it doesn't bother me.
It is, of course, a fair bit heavier (one 18650 weighs more than the stock player), but you can't have humongous battery life without paying anything.
Edit: in case it's puzzling you, the fourth picture is of the battery hooked up (via the red JST connector that you can see in the other pics) to my RC charger. The player retains the ability to charge via USB, but it takes eight hours to charge a 4Ah pack from the 500mA that's all that USB can provide, so I added the external option to speed things up.
Like this:
(the ugly volume switches are part of another repair - the previous owner had broken the original ones and removed the plastic cover on top of them, so I just cut the button openings wide open and glued in standard TAC switches)
Those are two 2 amp-hour 18650 LiIon cells connected in parallel, giving an equivalent capacity of approximately 4 Ah. Considering that current draw while playing Ogg Vorbis is extremely small (about 25 mA), the big battery ought to be enough to run the player for almost a week - continuously! Hence the "infinity" in the name
And it's not that much bigger compared to the original; it's no longer easily pocketable in pants, but I never put my player in my pants pockets anyway, so it doesn't bother me.
It is, of course, a fair bit heavier (one 18650 weighs more than the stock player), but you can't have humongous battery life without paying anything.
Edit: in case it's puzzling you, the fourth picture is of the battery hooked up (via the red JST connector that you can see in the other pics) to my RC charger. The player retains the ability to charge via USB, but it takes eight hours to charge a 4Ah pack from the 500mA that's all that USB can provide, so I added the external option to speed things up.
but this is by far the most overkill in relation to actual battery life/current draw. A few others: one is the Zen in my signature, which got a single 18650; another is my phone, of which I lack a picture, which got - you guessed it - yet another 18650; and then my old (and now sadly dead for good) digicam, which 
