Anelok: battery holder, quality issues

Werner Almesberger werner at almesberger.net
Sun May 18 16:17:14 EDT 2014


If you looked very closely at the pictures of the battery holder I
posted, you may have noticed that it's slightly damaged.

The holder in the pictures is this one:

http://batteryholders.com/part.php?pn=LP2032SM-JJ-GTR

The battery gets inserted on the round side (-) of the holder first,
then pushed down on the side of the elevated contact (+). Each side
has two little noses that help holding the battery.

Once can also insert the battery the other way around (contact side
first), but then you have to push it over the plastic noses, which
looks like a good way to break them.

The problem is that the noses are even more fragile. than I thought.
This is a closeup after a small number of insertion cycles (*):

http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/lp2032sm-cracked.jpg

The battery still stays in place, held by the other nose and the
contact, but it doesn't look pretty.

(*) About four months have passed between first trying the holder
    and this new experiment. Therefore, I don't remember the number
    of cycles that holder had, but I don't think it exceeded ten in
    total.


There is a variant of the holder design that I also tried:

http://batteryholders.com/part.php?pn=BLP2032SM-GTR

With this one, the battery is slid under the S-shaped metal (+),
then pushed down on the round side. There, I saw that the two noses
were already cracked from the earlier experiment but hadn't
separated yet. I could remove them by just passing with a
fingernail and without applying significant force, yielding this:

http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/blp2032sm-cracked.jpg

Interestingly, even with this amount of damage, the holder still
holds a battery, but of course less firmly than if intact.


I saw the nose of the LP2032SM break today while the BLP2032SM was
already cracked. The holders that showed the damage are the same as
in the picture I took in January:

http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/holders.jpg

So I went back to the original pictures (what I post is typically
scaled down to 20-50%, most often 25%) and magnified the noses of
the BLP2032SM:

http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/werner/anelok/tmp/blp2032sm-201401.jpg

As far as I can tell, there is no visible evidence of cracks. So
they're either simply not visible or they developed later, e.g., on
battery removal.


The holders's ability to constrain vertical battery movement is not
necessarily critical in Anelok since the case or lid can do the
same, but it's of course not nice to have a part that shows visible
degradation so quickly.

MPD don't specify how batteries should be inserted or removed, nor
how many insertion cycles a holder is expected to last. I'll ask
them.

- Werner



More information about the discussion mailing list


interactive