Anybody have a dead Fusion clock battery yet?

[2ManyKeys]

Hey all,

It's been a good bit since I posted. I was fiddling with my Fusions today and they are working great. Still, the nagging specter of limited RTC battery life remains.

Has anybody experienced a dead RTC battery? I'm wondering what happens.

The graceful way for the system to handle it would be that the Fusion simply forces you to set the clock every time it boots.

Who knows what will really happen though.

Some synths, like the SY/TG77,behave very badly with a dead battery. Those machines are hard to boot even after you replace the battery! A big difference though is machines like that rely on SRAM, that is backed by the battery, maintaining the whole system configuration. So they boot up with indeterminate garbage in memory once the SRAM power falls below a threshold and the CPU runs off into the weeds trying to interpret the nonsense configuration.

The Fusion does not have any SRAM banks that I know of as everything is loaded into DRAM when the system starts. For this reason I think it will simply be inconvenient when the battery dies but again who really knows.

I'm not losing sleep over it. Still, one of the last things I want to do is open up my Fusions again. Great machines to use but a nightmare to disassemble.

Scott

[Jesse]

On the Fusion you can turn the clock off if it is not going to be used for awhile, then you just need to turn it back on and set the time and date. You can turn the Fusion clock off and see what happens, I will go do it right now and let you know what happens

Well I guess we won't know until some one has a dead clock battery or disables the clock battery

Only disable clock for prolonged storage

Fusion only disable clock for prolonged storage

Fusion clock was disabled set date & time

Fusion clock disabled reset time

[2ManyKeys]

I assume that's what will happen when a battery actually dies. The RTC chip may have a power-loss flag of some sort and the Fusion will detect that on boot and just force you to reset the date/time which is only needed for the disk file system anyhow.

What's with your display color? Is that just the camera?
Oh wait, I can see you added a color filter over the display.

[2ManyKeys]

Here's further info on the I2C serial RTC (real time clock) chip used in the Fusion. It's located very close to the battery and the crystal oscillator necessary for it's time reference.

The clock continues to operate down to about 2V so it's no wonder these lithium cells have lasted so long.

It has no extra memory space internally for any system configuration to be stored so I'm more and more sure the Fusion will handle battery death pretty well.

https://www.st.com/en/clocks-and-timers/m41t00.html

[Jesse]

Good to see you back online Take Care

[AlesisDave]

I just did a similar post in another thread...i was told by an acquaintance in Santa Monica that used to repair Alesis equipment that a dead Lithium cell could in fact affect the boot up of a Fusion.

Mine keeps giving me "invalid OS" even after attempting to reload v124.

Is the battery soldered in and where is it as I want to be careful taking the boards out hunting as I for some reason have stripped phillips head screws on the main board?

[2ManyKeys]

Yes, the battery is soldered onto the main board so you have to remove the expansion board to get to it.

Synth designers who use a soldered-in battery design... a pox be upon you!

Who knows how many nice synths have taken the dirt nap because of a stupid little dead battery.

You'll have to CAREFULLY snip the battery off the board with diagonal cutters. Then you can solder a couple wires to the board contacts and to a CR2032 holder where you can put a replaceable cell. Don't be worried about wire length. At these current levels, the voltage drop over several feet of wire will still be just about nothing. That's how I have replaced the battery in several other keyboard synths, rack units, etc.

A CR2032 will not last as many years as the original larger BR2325 but it should last a number of years before you have to replace it again.

You can see the battery mounted just behind the Fusion MIDI ports in the top photo.

Below that you can see my somewhat ugly, but we'll isolated, battery fix on a Korg Trinity. Inside the red foam isolation is a CR2032 holder with the easily replaceable battery.

[2ManyKeys]

I just did a similar post in another thread...i was told by an acquaintance in Santa Monica that used to repair Alesis equipment that a dead Lithium cell could in fact affect the boot up of a Fusion.

Had this person actually worked on a Fusion with a dead battery or was this just a theory? I don't know of anybody who has had a dead battery yet.

EDIT: I read your other post so I guess he had.

[Jesse]

Nice relatively easy fix for the Fusion battery replacement