Noooo! How can they do this to meeee…
So, OK, backstory:
Six years ago I bought this — it’s an e-ink wifi-enabled picture frame:
I use it to display the temperature and the currently playing album. You know, absolutely vital things.
But the last few months, it seems like it’s getting wonkier and wonkier. It’ll display “can’t connect to wifi” half of the time, and half of the time it just “greys out”.
Either it’s just dying, or the battery is getting bad.
I mean, it’s six years old… how long are these batteries supposed to last? And in any case, a battery is the easiest thing to swap out before trying to do any other debugging.
So today I got this in the mail. And it’s 4Ah, while the old battery is just 2.5Ah, so it should also mean having to charge it less often. (The 2.5Ah battery lasts about a month.)
But then:
I saw that it had the wrong plug. NOO! THE HUMANITY!
If I understand correctly, that’s JST-BEC/JST-RCY or whatever it’s called on the new battery, while the Artframe wants a JST-PH connector?
OK, I guess I can either wait several days to get a battery with the correct connector, or I can just chop some wires and match them up.
I know I’ve got something along the lines of the above somewhere… If you were those, would you be here:
Or here:
Or here:
Or here:
Or here:
Or here:
As it turns out — none of those places. As far as I can tell.
But I did find this:
And there’s sufficient room in the frame!!!
Unfortunately, it’s for thicker wires — the screws don’t go all the way down. Darn!
OK, time to go Old Skool:
Cut.
Twist.
Use some electricians’ tape, which only took me half an hour to find.
Plug.
IT”S ALIVE! At least the LED!
Looking good…
YAY!!! Except for the temperature, which is nothing to be happy about, I guess.
There you go — the Artframe still works after six years, and it’s easily servicable, so I guess I still have to recommend it.