[DIY battery replacement options?]

16 minutes ago, david said:

A couple questions:

Did you use aluminum flux when soldering?

Are these batteries a single cell or more than one cell?  The reason I am asking is because I am pondering using an external charger to keep the spare batteries charged over time.  The chargers have connectors for balancing the cells, but it requires extra wires coming from the batteries.  

Rosin flux 😁

Are you considering my ugly hack after all? It's two cells with a massive board and two connectors, and I have no idea what all that's about, but the punchline is that I took it apart and just used one cell.

Here is what's left of it

 

[DIY battery replacement options?]

 

8 hours ago, david said:

Wow, this looks like you found/built the holy grail we have all been looking for.  Did you take that board off your pro1x battery or did you get it somewhere else?

How is it working for you now?

It would be great if you could explain what you connected to what, and more details about the isolation issues.

I wouldn't say holy, more like cheapskate emergency grail, since it's a whole amp hour less than the original, and requires a lot of elbow grease to replace.

Yes, I took the board off the original battery, it was soldered so came out clean. The replacement was similarly attached to its own board, but I ended up physically breaking it off by repeatedly folding the tabs, which I guess made them a bit shorter. If you are better than me with a soldering iron, or maybe use a heat gun you should be able to de-solder those as well, and that will give you a better surface to work with. They of course didn't align with pro1x's board so had to solder those "horns" from the first photo onto them, and add that extra insulation in the middle, so that they don't touch the components on the board once folded, since you need to fold it down to fit it in. Otherwise just replaced the outer insulation that was already there. I was going to take photos of all that, but got carried away and ended with just those two 😄

It's working well so far for my use cases, usually just fast charge it once a day or twice if I'm doing something heavy for a long period of time, which in my case is either a game or ffmpeg. It's noticeably less than the original, but usable, pretty much as you would expect. I haven't dropped it yet, so durability is in question, though in general I guess it would depend on your own hacking skillz.

[DIY battery replacement options?]

For my po1x I got this 2250mah twix deal
https://aliexpress.ru/item/1005005043077240.html?sku_id=12000031429438778
short circuited it a few too many times while removing and attaching the boards, and at least once to the phone housing cause I forgot the isolation, but somehow it survived and seems to be working fine. I'm going to torture it with fast charging see how long it lasts for me.

Sidenotes:
- Bunch of ribbon cables under the battery, I almost destroyed one while prying it off, some real tough glue there.
- My bottom speaker always worked intermittently, and especially at lower volume levels, turned out it had this sticker on it that was misaligned and partially covered the membrane, easy fix.