Cloning a Sennheiser BA2015 battery pack

91 points by zdw a day ago on hackernews | 15 comments

amelius | 6 hours ago

> Conclusion

> It is absolutely possible to do this, but the resulting battery pack won't be nearly as solid as even the third party packs that are available. With the amount of time required to fiddle with the connection paperclip and winding the temperature sensor leads around a tiny plastic tab it is probably not worth it to print your batteries.

acters | 4 hours ago

Which is silly because they seem to struggle with maneuvering around the little plastic tab to have the battery detected as rechargeable.

mystifyingpoi | 4 hours ago

Very common practice in music gear industry, unfortunately. I've recently bit the bullet and bought MyVolts Step Up for $20, it is literally a PD trigger worth maybe 50 cents plus a plug.

birdman3131 | 4 hours ago

Should see the shure ones. Shure SB900C is like $115. And at least last I looked I never saw any aftermarket ones.

At 8 mics and 6 in-ear packs you can get a lot of alkalines.

MartijnBraam | 4 hours ago

I'm glad most of my music gear isn't battery powered. I do have a painful amount of different camera chargers though...
> I do have a painful amount of different camera chargers though...

It is ridiculous how many different battery packs canon makes.

The author didn't go far enough, should have ripped out the battery holder, installed a single lifepo4 or lipo, added a USB-C charging/protection board and a low quiescent current LDO to simulate 2.7V a couple of freshly charged nimh's puts out.

MartijnBraam | 4 hours ago

Author here, the best solution I think would be just ripping the temperature sensor from the battery pack and soldering it to the contact in the microphone instead, then you can just pop in regular rechargable batteries and it'll work. No need to add lipos to this.
The thermistor looks like a Semitec ###NT series, if you want the exact one.

103NT H34G, I suppose?

AdrianB1 | 4 hours ago

At least in the newest headset Sennheiser announced user replaceable battery, without announcing the price or if it is a standard format that you can buy everywhere or a very pricey gold-pressed latinum custom audiophile one.

MrBuddyCasino | 3 hours ago

My AA charger detects alkalines and refuses to charge them. This must be a money grab.

arendtio | 3 hours ago

Cool result, but just so much work for something that should be a no-brainer.

My Sennheiser RS 180 still works with normal rechargeable AAA batteries (charging on the official station).

Yet another case where the newer models are just worse.

__natty__ | 3 hours ago

Lmao. Price for the original battery pack is absurdly high. Good clone.

haunter | 3 hours ago

Reminds me to a good old Youtube video: £500 Nagra battery pack is actually just around £22, lot of empty spaces and a big chunk of foam too lol

Have been removed from Youtube but IA archived it https://web.archive.org/web/20160222190825/https://www.youtu...

userbinator | an hour ago

This is a common arrangement. The replaceable batteries in phones also usually have 3 or 4 terminals for a thermistor.

I suspect many of those who have 3D printers may also have enough scraps of plastic lying around to be able to make something like this from; a few sheets cut and solvent-welded together would likely be stronger.