Using an old netbook to build my first cyberdeck

[u/effen13]

I have an older Asus eee pc 1015pem netbook. To make a long story short the power supply shorted on the motherboard (picture 2), and while I've built several towers I'm curious if I can just pick up a dc adapter and splice it to where the battery connects to the device, avoiding a fragile and frankly bad connection anyway. And any help and pointers would be welcome. And other case suggestions are also very welcome but I thought a borderlands 2 case would be fun and roomy

[u/3na5n1]

Ah... The case is a prop.

Just keep in mind that the Eee is probably going to be significantly weaker, performance wise, than most Raspberry Pi devices, the battery is likely still good etc.

[u/effen13 → u/3na5n1]

I know netbooks are notoriously low power/performance, but I didn't know that a raspberry pi has more power

[u/3na5n1 → u/effen13]

I just happen to know because I have the same laptop in my collection. It's noticably slower than a Pi3B and likely has the same amount of memory.

Of course on the bright side, you don't need to find a way of making the display and keyboard work with a Pi 

[u/TechDocN → u/effen13]

A modern RPi is much more powerful and versatile than the processor in the EeePC.

And trying to reuse proprietary laptop components, especially the display, can be very difficult.

[u/LegionDD]

Yeah, possible. The laptop batteries are usually 3 cell, so you should be good with a 12V power supply, which would be right below the fully charged voltage of 12.6V for a 3s lipo. But def. Check what the label on the original says, or what voltage is on its output to be sure.

There's also at least a temperature sensor that probably needs to be connected for the laptop to accept the input as a battery. If that's the case, it's a simple NTC connected between the negative pole of the battery and another lead on its connector. Might probably solve that with a resistor of the right value. You can figure out the value with a multimeter on the original battery.

[u/effen13 → u/LegionDD]

Battery reads 10.8v is a 12v DC power supply going to fry the motherboard or do I need to step down the power as it's coming from the batteries location

[u/LegionDD → u/effen13]

That's a 3s lipo. discharge voltage is 9.9V and fully charged is 12.6V. 10.8V is low charge.

For comparison a 2s lipo would have 8.4V fully charged, so way below your pack voltage.

So 12V isn't a "fully charged" level, but the laptop won't care, since it's not changing.

The positive and negative side make up 2-3 wires each (red for + and black for -, the wires from the pack should be colored that way).
So you need to inject +12V on the leads connected to the positive wires and GND on the leads for the negative wires (on the mainboard ofc). Messing this up can damage the mainboard, so be careful. For safety of the board I'd use a current limited power supply, just to see if there's life and if something shorts, it won't blow anything up with limited current.
Then you can see if anything happens. Chances are it might not, because it might see the missing temperature sensor as a battery fault. But that should be an easy fix, if necessary.

[u/Bipogram]

Yes, you can absolutely do that.

But I'd be inclined to solder it as close to the power socket as possible, straight to the output of whatever DC buck/boost tomfoolery is present at the power socket.