[Coco] Survey of Coco realtime clock users

[Robert Gault]

Arthur Flexser wrote:
> Out of curiosity, how'd you go about replacing the battery?  It looked like the
> battery was potted in epoxy or something and not at all easy to replace.  On the
> other hand, it was rated to last 10 years.  How long did yours hold out for?  I
> never heard of a case of one finally giving out.
> 
> Art
> 

Not sure exactly when I bought it but a expect at least 10 years ago.

Right the battery is potted and I doubt it would be safe to try to 
remove the epoxy. I measured the voltage on the exposed DS1216 leads and 
found several with about 1vDC. The battery is a lithium and should be 
about 3vDC.

Marty Goodman posted some suggestions on replacing the battery but I'm 
not sure he actually did it. While one should remove the battery from 
the circuit, I decided placing a new one in parallel would be sufficient.

Radio Shack has all lithium batteries at the same price so I bought the 
largest one, about 5 to 6 times larger than the one in the Smartwatch. 
Should last 50-60 years :)  Solder connected it to DS1216 pin4 +v and 
pin8 ground. Pre-tested this with two dry cells in series.

Works great!