So my family got this Chinese noodle making machine set for a good deal, except it had one small problem…
The screen displayed ”Please change battery“ with the manual saying that it needed to be brought to an “authorized service centre”. It wouldn’t start at all.
Now there’s obviously no official service centres for imported electronic goods here in Melbourne, let alone Australia at all, but it was still odd that a mains-powered appliance even needed a battery in the first place. So my first step was to check if there were any circuit schematics online so we could get some idea of what this battery was connected so, since I would be the ‘service centre’ now.
Low and behold I was eventually able to find one that indicated a 3V CR2477 being connected to the central computer circuit, presumably to power a clock. (because every kitchen appliance has to shoehorn a clock in somehow!) I don’t have this on hand anymore but it’s what I remember anyways since this project has been a little on and off thanks to work from uni.
So I finally got around to opening the thing up and I realise that it needs an absolute unit of a large tri-wing screwdriver. Far too deep for my own screw bit kit. I ordered one extra long Y3 screwdriver from ebay like the one below. Courtesy of ebay. According to my measurements, it needed to be at least 11cm long at the deepest point if I remember correctly.
So it was a waiting game again for this to arrive, along with shopping for a Bunnings soldering iron and a Jaycar AA battery holder. Though luckily it only took about 2 weeks.
So with everything on hand, I could finally open the thing.
So after poking around inside and realising that I didn’t need to take out the PSU, I saw that there were two phillips screws to remove from the underside of the control panel atop the machine.
Once these are out, the top section of the control panel lifts off to reveal the main board connected to a smaller board which contains the aforementioned battery. Fortunately, getting around this issue was quite simple, as it just involved soldering the batttery connected to some wires and soldering those wires to the corresponsing terminals on the battery board connector. Apologies for the lack of photos in this section, the idea for this article was somewhat last-minute!
At first I tried desoldering the battery from the board until my dumbass realised that it was glued down, so I promptly gave up on that and desoldered the connector from the board instead, soldering the wires directly to this connector rather than relying on the frankly, now useless board.
I opted to keep the battery pack inside using some good old scotch tape to avoid any snags or damaging the battery wires, seeing as the bottom wasn’t too hard to remove and we shouldn’t need to replace the battery THAT often (I hope).
So with that all done the machine finally booted up (presumably) correctly and was able to do something, other than complain about a bad battery.
So it seems to work fine now, until the batteries need to be replaced again.
Shoutout to the only other online discussion of someone fixing this problem here: https://www.zhihu.com/question/353977041/answer/1096986540
Even when searching in chinese, this was the only other guide of sorts for how to overcome the battery issue. This individuals post proved quite helpful to me, so I thought I’d write up this post for English speakers who run into this problem as well to make what needs to be done more obvious.
