This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
This battery lasts the life of the router under the operating environmental conditions specified for the router, and is not field-replaceable.
But who determines its lifespan?
Knowing there is a battery set to fail and I can't simply replace it makes me physically uncomfortable. Enough so that I'd rather it not have RTC.
Thanks Cisco.
If you think that’s bad, some old arcade cabinets had suicide batteries. Their only purpose was to keep a sram chip alive that held a decryption key. Battery dies? No more game for you.
DRM sucks as usual.
Vintage DRM 🙄
(with type covered as a bonus)
Relevant fact: Most standard non-letter batteries are named after their physical size, for example a CR2032 is 20mm diameter x 3.2mm height; or not a button battery, but an 18650 is 18mm diameter x 65.0mm height.
Nice! Do the Letters mean anything?
Generally the chemistry and any features of the battery.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Button_cell#Type_designation
C means Lithium. The R means Round.
The IS IEC spec that defines the coding is 60086-3
But who determines its lifespan?
The RTC battery, obviously.
The Cisco tax sure is spent in weird ways.
But knowing Cisco, the router would be unsupported and with some unpatched zero day vulnerability when the RTC battery dies...
If you know this much then replacing the battery with a battery holder should be simple.
Its not about knowing everything. You can know a lot but don't have the skills. Cisco doesn't make cheap products and screwing it up, it not good. Especially it can be easily done at the factory. Its not like it would cost them much more. I can get a holder for like 0.50 to 1€ per piece. There you must subtract 19% VAT and think in bigger quantities. On a per device basis, its not adding much.
They do this, because it adds up and they can save a lot of money. They make more money when a customer pays for a replacement or when a customer screw things up and needs to buy a new device. Its not something companies should be allowed to do. Also it would be even better if we don't need to tell companies what they should do and they do it themselves. In fact a lot do this, because it doesn't add much to the total cost of one device, but it makes the product better.
I was just going there... Couple solders to the existing connections and you're in business. Total cost? 4 dollars for equipment and a bit of time.
As far as what battery it is, measure it in metric. (mm) Search up a button battery chart. One of those should have voltage and measurements you can compare against.
To go further, all those 3v button batteries are essentially the same. You can buy any one of similar thickness to replace one like that, that you will have to re-solder in place. It's definitely a 20mm across one, so the first numbers will be 20. For thickness I'm guessing by the looks of it, it's either 3.5mm thick or 4.0mm thick, so last two numbers will be 35 or 40. So you want either a 2035 or a 2040 as a replacement.
They're all 3v. The only difference in button style batteries thickness is how much capacity they hold. If it physically fits in a device and you can create the connection for the top and bottom, it will work. I've used a little piece of metal or wire to bridge a gap to make a thinner battery replace what was supposed to be a thicker one if I didn't have the right size on hand. Just means it will die a bit sooner.
Cisco? I'm not surprised.
Not even soldered, but spot-welded. Still 'not field replaceable' sounds like a challenge to me. I be with some wirecutters, some solder, and a little bit of wire that battery can be easily replaced.
I've found the little flush cutters that came with my Ender3s are awesome for removing stuff that's been spot-welded like this. I took apart a few cordless tool packs with them, and kept everything so neat I could easily reuse all the tabs if I wanted.
Just wait until you get your hands on some quality flush cutters. (Knipex is an example or even Weller sometimes.)
Keep using cheap ones for general purpose use, but a good set of flush cutters is worth its weight in gold when you actually need dozens of actual flush cuts.
Have you have ever seen the Rick and Morty episode where Morty experiences true level? Yeah. It's like that.
Some true asshole manufacturers store critical data in a prom. They solder the batteries in and if you remove them and it loses power the prom clears bricking the device. C/KU band satellite receivers do this. As well as many older cable tv boxes. I used to repair them and had bench power supplies to keep the prom alive during repair. At the end of my run with the cable industry I had started cloning the proms and replacing the information that they stored there.
Not half as bad is potted in RTC batteries. As in: The RTC chip and battery are inside the same epoxy-filled package. The bane of vintage SUN hardware (and some PC clone manufacturers in the 386-486 era) collectors.
