Here's the latest.
As you may know if you read the "battery problems" thread in
this forum I had been running into odd issues with my iPod
shutting off shortly after being turned on until it just
wouldn't even work anymore.
If I connected via the firewire connection on the top of the
unit, it would work - just so long as it connected to my G4.
So far so good, right?
The more I think about it the more I KNOW FOR A FACT that
the iPod is NOT charging at all. I have pictures that I've
taken tonight with my digital camera.
I'd heard about early revision iPod units that would develop
a cold solder joint in the firewire jack so the battery just
would not charge even if connected - the voltage wasn't
getting there.
My friend Paul took out his volt-ohm meter to determine
what if any voltage the battery had left. He devised an
intricate way of reading the battery and found out it has
160 millivolts left, which is manifestly too little.
He used alligator clips, a short length of lead from a
twist tie to connect to the battery terminal and the
standard probes from the volt ohm meter.
We connected the firewire charger to the AC voltage and he
tried to route the voltage to the battery bypassing the
firewire jack altogether and got the battery to go from 160
millivolts to about 3.7 volts in a matter of minutes but it
was still too low to get the iPod to twitch a knee.
Stand by. I've heard Apple once replaced iPods with the
cold solder joint problem but since I'm long out of warranty
I need to do these ridiculous things to get the thing going
again.
We're thinking if we can get a full charge on the battery I
may have a working iPod again.
Then we need to consider how to get the firewire jack
operational again since I don't relish opening the back
of the iPod every time I want to charge the battery.
Stay tuned.
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