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- BATSET Set the batterie on HP100LX
-
- Weasel Words:
-
- I am not a batterie engineer. HP made it very difficult to change the fast
- charge time. I doubt that was by accident. Please make your own decisions about
- what you think this value should be. I just wanted to change it for me, and
- thought some of my friends on CIS might like to also.
-
- Disclaimer:
-
- Every effort has been made to test thoroughly and verify the functions of
- this program. However, THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED "AS-IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
- KIND. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH
- YOU, SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE ENTIRE COST OF ALL
- NECESSARY SERVICEING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. Make backup copies of your important
- files often and use this program at your own risk.
-
- Usage:
-
- Since the setting of the battery to Alkaline, Nickel Cadmium and charging
- status are reset by a hard reset, I wanted to be able to set them properly in my
- AUTOEXEC.BAT file. BATSET will do these for you.
-
- BATSET ( /A | /N | /C )
-
- If you specify /A then the 100 will be set for Alkaline batteries and no
- charging. /N for Nickel Cadmium and no charging. /C for Nickel Cadmium and
- charging.
-
- In addition BATSET will allow you to change the 6 hour fast charge timer on
- the 100LX. When the AC adapter is plugged in or charging is specified the 100LX
- will charge the batteries at a rate of 100mA for 6 hours. Then it will continue
- to charge at a rate of 45mA.
-
- BATSET /T=hh:mm
-
- Minimum value is 1 minute (00:01), Maximum value is 24 hours and 59 minutes.
-
- Using normal Nickel Cadmium AA cells usually rated about .400AH they will be
- properly charged from empty in about 6 hours at 100mA. However if you should be
- using high capacity Nickel Cadmiums, they can have ratings as high as .850AH and
- would be much better served by a longer fast charge, on the order of about 12
- hours.
-
- If you use the parameter to change this fast time, then BATSET will terminate
- and stay resident. That means about 500 bytes of memory will be kept by BATSET,
- and BATSET will chain to the Timer Tick interrupt and do its own counting. It
- will look for the system counter to be reset to 0. This reset will happen when
- the AC adapter is plugged in or it was plugged in but you just specified
- charging. Now BATSET will set the system's charge timer to 1 hour and hold it
- there until BATSET's own timer reaches the specified time. At this time BATSET
- will set the system's charge timer to 6 hours, and the system will notice that
- value and switch to slow charging.
-
- If you have programs which read this system counter (e.g. Mark Scardina's
- BATT100) you should be aware that with BATSET installed you will only ever see 1
- hour in that field as long as fast charging is active. Then for slow charging
- the number will start from 6 hours. An Example: Say you have BATSET set for 10
- hours, and you run BATT100. BATT100 says you are slow charging and the timer
- says 7:40. That means that you have fast charged for 10 hours and slow charged
- for an additional 1 hour and 40 minutes (7:40 - 6:00).
-
- BATSET is not a sophisticated terminate and stay resident program. Once loaded
- it will stay there until you reboot. There is no way to remove it. Also do not
- load it while you have system manager loaded, because when you close the DOS
- application the timer tick interrupt will still point to where BATSET was and
- ... well ... uhhh. Guess it is reset time. So put it in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file
- ahead of system manager command (100).
-
- If you regularly keep your 100 plugged into AC, then you probably should not
- need to increase your charging time. You may want to consider decreasing it. If,
- on the other hand, you run your high capacity Nickel Cadmiums down until you are
- getting a low batterie message then you probably want to increase the time to
- about the capacity of the batterie times 150% divided by the charge current
- hours. For example if you have Radio Shack's High Capacity .850AH, multiply by
- 150% for 1.275, then divide by charge current .100A to get a charge time of
- 12.75 hours. Remember this assumes we start with completely exhaused batterie
- and charge it to 100%. I doubt we would be starting with a completely exhaused
- batterie, but probably pretty low if you getting low batterie messages.
-
- It appears that there are folks who do not like TSRs for any reason. To
- accomidate such folks I have added 2 new parameters:
-
- BATSET /R /E
-
- The 'R' will reset the system's batterie counter to 0. So if you run this
- before the 6 hours are up, you will get another 6 hours from that time. The 'E'
- merely stuffs an escape character into the keyboard buffer so if you run the 'R'
- from APPT you can bypass the PRESS ANY CHARACTER TO CONTINUE message.
-
- I leave the creation of a system macro to run this in five hours and fifty
- five minutes from the time the macro is invoked as an exercise for the user.
-
- Freeware by Alex Patterson
-
- Enjoy.
-