[Coco] Smartwatch results

[Willard Goosey]

It turns out that my Smartwatch battery isn't dead, the problem was
that I'm an idiot. :-(

Here's the situation.  My smartwatch is set up in a bizzare way.
Instead of going under the Disk BASIC ROM, it lives in the (otherwise)
empty ROM socket of my RS-232 pak.  

As some of you may know, the Deluxe RS-232 pak has a somewhat demented
ROM socket.  It starts out as a 28-pin DIP socket, all well and good.
Then it starts getting weird:  Pins 14 & 15 aren't used, the contacts
aren't there, making it a 26-pin socket.  But what I hadn't realized
until recently, pins 1 & 28, while having the contacts present, are
not connected to the board, making it a 24-pin socket.

So, my rs-232 pak with smartwatch was sold to be long ago by a very
clever fellow, PWZ.  He set this all up.  Interestingly, the only
thing he had to do to make it all work was tie pin26 to pin 28 on the
smartwatch, and install the smartwatch such that pins 1 & 28 are
hanging off the end of the socket.  Shorting pin 26 to 28 brings Vcc
from the socket up to the Vcc line of the smartwatch module and the
address lines all line up right.    

That this works at all is a credit to the designers of the original
ROM chip hardware!

Anyway, at some point in the past, I had some trouble with my
smartwatch, and cut the 26-28 jumper so I could put it in the Disk
controller's ROM socket.  And when I went to put it back in the rs-232
pak.... I messed up.  I looked at the smartwatch, and I looked at the
socket... and tied 27 and 28 together.  

Hasn't worked right since.  Gee, I wonder why? :-(

Well, last week I finally tracked down Dr. Goodman's article on
installing an external battery on the smartwatch module, and took
everything apart so I could see what I needed to do.  But the battery
tested out fine!  So what's the problem, then?  Maybe this ancient
rs-232 pak has a broken trace?  Humm, the top two pins of the ROM
socket aren't wired to anything....  Oh, OK, that means I'm an idiot.

It all works, now! 

As an aside, I'm just as glad.  I wasn't looking forward to adding the
external battery.  The top ROM socket on the smartwatch pries off
easily, but there's still not a lot of room to clip two of the chip's
pins, bend them up, and solder a wire from the battery to them.

Willard
-- 
Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
Socorro, New Mexico, USA
"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
   --- Yacko