Hello, new guy with a question here. I sell games online (board, card, video, etc.), and as part of my business I spend a lot of my spare time cleaning and restoring old cartridge games. Many older carts use a volatile SRAM chip to store saved game states (non-volatile memory chips being prohibitively expensive at the time), and to power them a coin cell battery is soldered onto the circuit board.
It's impressive how long those old nickel-cadmium batteries last (I find functional batteries all the time in 25+ year old NES carts), but eventually they all die and need to be replaced. The simple solution is to just solder a new battery directly onto the board, and it's cheap & easy to buy them in bulk with leads already attached, but I'd like to start replacing them with battery holders instead so that the next person who needs to swap out the battery won't need to break out his or her soldering iron to do it. The main problem with that solution is finding a battery holder with a low enough profile to fit inside the plastic cartridge shell, but since pretty much all console game carts use CR2032 batteries* I only need to find one design works.
Anyway, I finally found a holder that seems to fit everywhere I need it to fit, but it's a surface mount component. Would it be possible to modify these to work with a through-hole board, preferably without raising its profile? Or if someone can point me to a through-hole version of this holder, that would be pretty great, too.
* Games for portable systems use the smaller CR2016 variety, but good luck finding a battery holder that will fit inside a Game Boy Color cartridge. Which is too bad, because some of the later Pokemon games drain power like crazy (they kept track of things like calendar dates and time of day to trigger certain events and whatnot) -- their save batteries start to die after just a few years, not decades.
It's impressive how long those old nickel-cadmium batteries last (I find functional batteries all the time in 25+ year old NES carts), but eventually they all die and need to be replaced. The simple solution is to just solder a new battery directly onto the board, and it's cheap & easy to buy them in bulk with leads already attached, but I'd like to start replacing them with battery holders instead so that the next person who needs to swap out the battery won't need to break out his or her soldering iron to do it. The main problem with that solution is finding a battery holder with a low enough profile to fit inside the plastic cartridge shell, but since pretty much all console game carts use CR2032 batteries* I only need to find one design works.
Anyway, I finally found a holder that seems to fit everywhere I need it to fit, but it's a surface mount component. Would it be possible to modify these to work with a through-hole board, preferably without raising its profile? Or if someone can point me to a through-hole version of this holder, that would be pretty great, too.
* Games for portable systems use the smaller CR2016 variety, but good luck finding a battery holder that will fit inside a Game Boy Color cartridge. Which is too bad, because some of the later Pokemon games drain power like crazy (they kept track of things like calendar dates and time of day to trigger certain events and whatnot) -- their save batteries start to die after just a few years, not decades.
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