Month: March 2020

Oral-B toothbrush stand generation upgrade (#P22)

After just eleven years of excellent service, my Oral-B 25.526.3/”9500 Triumph” electric toothbrush died from mechanical failure – the gears went a bit toothless (oh the irony), so while vibration was still on, it wouldn’t rotate the brush. I did exchange the NiCd battery some years ago, but the drive cannot be disassembled, so that was a total loss. Meh.
At the time I spent 70€ and this model was on the higher end of the Oral-B product line. 11 years later even the cheapest models are lithium battery based and I would expect essential technology has trickled down to the base models. […]


CR2025/CR2032 battery dummy for power consumption tests and a hungry Supermicro board (#P21)

This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]