More power (literally) for the HP-41, follow-up.

[Sylvain Cote]

I have received my 82120D beta unit Friday afternoon.

First, this is a very well done battery pack, it fit perfectly, the insertion and removal from the 41 is very easy.

Upon reception, the first thing I did was to try the card reader, after 50 cards with the initial charge, no bat annunciator was displayed, impressive.

Then I plugged an Apple 120v 20W USB-C adapter into the battery pack for the night to have a full charged unit before starting the real tests.
Upon connection a small RED LED light up to indicate that unit is charging.
When I came back the next morning, a BLUE LED was light up to indicate that the unit was fully charged, nice.
Diego told me that his tests shows that the charging takes between 3h 30m to 4h 45m with a standard smartphone chargers.

My test setup is:

• HP-41CX half-nut , rev: 0:NFL 1:DCC
• rebuilt card reader, rev: CR-1G
• optical wand
  

I did the following tests:

1. read/write 305 magnetic cards
2. read 315 barcode program strips (the entire Games solution book)
3. the following test program has been running for 122h45m (updated on 2023-08-18 15h30 GMT-04:00 DST)
   

Still no BAT annunciator!

My goal is to read cards and run programs until the BAT annunciator light up.

This is way over and above the wildest expectation that I had.
Thank you Diego for solving my 40 years old issue about using the card reader with rechargeable batteries.

Sylvain

Edit: update run time

PS: test program ...

Code:

LBL "BTST"
  FIX 6
  0
  SETSW
  RUNSW
LBL 00
  RCLSW
  VIEW X
  FS? 49
    GTO 01
  -.1
  GETKEYX
  RDN
  X=0?
    GTO 00
LBL 01
  STOPSW
  RCLSW
  VIEW X
END