There are many people still using AA batteries mounted off board for memory backup, especially on the older pinball machines, and it appears that there is a segment of hobbyist that have had problems in doing this, so I thought I would layout one way using a couple items off the Dollar Store Page. The first would be DS109, the heavy duty aluminum holder pic'd below.
 Then using the item DS128, a hank of speaker wire, you can relocate your batteries to a suitable off-board location.  The married speaker wire has one lead striped making it easy to polarize by using it as the ground wire & the solid white wire as the positive lead. There are .187 QDs on one end making it as easy to hook up to the holder.  Cut a piece off the other end of the speaker wire about an inch long & separate, strip & tin the ends. Use these to jumper the holders into a series configuration.  The striped wire entering on the bottom corner will be your negative, or ground side, and the postive end of the first battery is jumpered over to the negative end of battery two. The positive end of battery two is jumpered over to the negative end of battery three. Now the positive side leaves from the positive end of battery three to go to your remote positive terminal of your PCB or whatever project. You only need to use three sections of the holder since 1.5 volt batteries daisy chained in this fashion... 3 x 1.5v ... will give you 4.5 volts combined output... more than enough to ensure memory backup.  Once you have this together you can mount it in a convenient spot using small screws or double sided adhesive tape. Run the wire back to where you need it & cut off the excess.  Going a step further, you can add an inline break using a 2 position Molex connector. Just be sure to carry through the correct polarity... stripe wire in, stripe wire out. This is not necessarily my idea of the best way to retain memory, but it is a cheap enough way. Note: If you are using this to replace a ni-cad battery you have to install a blocking diode in-line to defeat the charger system. In fact, let me put another pic here with the charger defeated.
Happy Gaming... |