I might take you up on that. I have not had any success with printing TPU on my 3d printer. It worked well for the battery enclosure, but I would love to get some replacement feet, and rollers for the trackball if you are able to reproduce them. Let me know how it turns out and I can pay you for the parts.
Yeah it looks like the rod is 1mm and the outer diameter is supposed to be 4mm (mine is all over the place). As long as it is grippy enough to grab the track ball, that might be a good solution. And much easier to get a perfectly round outer diameter. Mine left/right one is slightly lumpy and it is painful to use. The up/down one has a flat spot and a large lump and it actually gets caught trying to spin and refuses to move more than a few pixels. I'll probably order some as well in the hopes it will work. I'm currently using a Kensington ADB trackball, so the experience is still somewhat authentic.
Yeah, let's see if those work and if you're willing to snip off a bit and print som feet, I'll split the cost of the silicon tubing and pay for shipping. I'm not in a huge rush as I will probably be keeping the Portable opened up for a while doing the power port repairs, recap of the backlight inverter, and probably the hybrid module replacement. Appreciate it!
I have a charging stand if you need any measurements - but they're not exactly a complicated bit of engineering. There is a button that gets depressed when the battery is in place - I've not looked inside but I'm guessing it doesn't do much more than disconnecting the charge pins when there's no battery installed..
Yeah, I was thinking a couple of bent contacts for positive and negative, like the battery compartment in the Portable. Then a momentary switch in the base that the weight of the battery will hold down. With a slight chamfer to the lip to guide it into the contacts (fortunately the contacts are huge, so this should be easy. I may even use one of my spare Portable battery adapter PCBs as the wiring and connection point for the contacts.
I use a Hakko desoldering tool from under the main portable PCB. The pins are pretty skinny, there's a lot of solder around them.
That silicone tubing worked but the inner diameter is a little too big so i had to put a dab of superglue in the shaft to hold them in place but it so far its working good.
Thanks for the info on this! They have some 0.8mm ones on ebay so maybe I will try that.
A bit late, but I realized my recently published project might be exactly what you need: https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/mac-portable-battery-charger-tray.2878/ Maybe that helps, at least as a reference!
Ohhh it works perfect, I have a ton Of that tubing now if you want some ( Just watched your YouTube vid repairing a board).
