forum.excito.com

I thought I should share: I have a bunch of B3s, and I discovered that in all of them the RTC battery leaked - which may lead to damage to PCB.

You need to open B3, remove the (very small) screw holding PCB, replace the LR44 battery (clean up if it already leaked) and you'll be good to go again.

Thanks for info.

clean contacts...
Even better change it for a Silver-oxide (SR44)
Puma

April seems like a good month to make the annual "Remember to check your RTC battery"-month, right?

I just opened my B3 and found a small mess of dried up powdery stuff from a leak around the RTC battery.

I suppose I can just try it my self, but does anyone know if the B3 works well entirely without a battery, leaving the slot completely empty? I mean except from the obvious RTC not working while powered down. Anything else apart from the RTC that needs the battery? If it isn't required I think I'll just remove it and stop worrying.

BTW, I searched the B3 manual and found no reference to the RTC battery at all. That seems odd, did I miss something?

Try it out and let us know

It will work. Only thing that happens is that on reboot the clock will reset to a hardware specific date. I have this on my bubbagen developer machine where the RTC in fact still didn't work any more after replacing the battery. I use a local.d startup script (rclocal in Debian) to set the correct time with ntpdate so except for some log lines generated during startup all is fine.

This leak happened to me too, and as stasheck warned, it did damage something, and now the damn thing doesn't boot up. Any ideas how start troubleshooting?

First thing is to thoroughly clean with rubbing alcohol and dry it out. After this, you can inspect if any traces are corroded - using something like contact spray may help a little bit; outside of that you might need someone to repair it for you.