With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

two thirds of what?

2008 March 14 21:04

I ran across this battery in my basement the other day:

Anyone know what this is a battery for? (I know, I'm asking it as a rhetorical question.) Consider it foreshadowing for a blog feature that will be coming soon. Here's a hint: It has noting to do with my car and it has nothing to do with flying or airplanes.

Since this battery and its siblings are over 15 years old now, I've been looking for replacements. There's a Panasonic Lithium camera battery that's pretty close, which will work, but it's a tight fit in the socket that the battery goes in. Just now, it occured to me that the important marking is the one in the middle, "BR=2/3A". I had alwasy thought that "A" stood for "amperes", so the two bottom markings above "matsushita electric" were statements of the battery's voltage and current capacity, but it turns out that BR-2/3A is the battery type. That is, it's two-thirds the length of an A-type battery (used to be available along with AA and AAA).

So by searing Google for "2/3A" and "battery", I think I finally found a source of exact replacement batteries. This web site gets kudos for being cheaper than the other places that came up on google and they have exact battery measurements in mm, which allowed me to match the size. Woot!

More to come.