Building a modern power supply solution for the PowerBook 500 Series laptops!

Unreliable old chargers begone!

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Music Used:
Aeolia by Onefin

Video 23 of 2023 (Update videos do not add to this count)

[TheBasementChannel]

Finally, a decent use for a thinkpad charger. Well done!

[thevintageprogrammr]

Hello, I wanted to give you as well as the others in the thread a quick thanks for sharing this method!

A couple of days ago from writing this, I found a Powerbook 520c for incredibly cheap, apparent reason being its power supply having blown up at some point (this was confirmed when I saw a huge black scorch mark under the metal shielding, along with the fact that it only outputted 0.2V in a multimeter). While it may have been possible to find out what exploded and be able to replace it, I am not super good at component level repair and even if I was it would have probably been a nightmare pinpointing it. I then came across your video and decided it would be worth trying since the tools were all within arm's length (managed to pulled out a scrap laptop with a barrel jack that turned out to fit the plug anyway). This was all that was needed for the Powerbook to come back to life!

As someone has stated before, this will be a bigger necessity in the future when the originals either get more expensive or fail. I may look into ways to make the setup more stable by putting the barrel plug on a pcb with traces leading to the different wires and by 3-d printing a shell. Once again, the video guide was a big help to me and I wanted to give thanks as well as add one more confirmation that this method indeed works!

[cdos]

Wow really nice job! This is going to be super useful in the future as more and more of the original chargers eventually die, at least a way more easy and convenient way to get the machine back working again. I appreciate the video and guide on how to do this! Also I am curious, do you ever plan on getting the original batteries in some of these 90s systems working again? Or is that something that takes special tools and a ton of time and money? Asking because the original batteries always seem to leak and die, like they need new cells, although I don't think it is that easy if I recall.