I recently purchased a Zebra CS6080 barcode scanner off eBay for $50. Got it, and sadly it wouldn’t charge on the Qi pad I had. Fast flashing amber light. Looking at the manual, this means the battery had some issue. Checking the voltage with a multimeter, I got 0V. Guessing this thing just sat unused for a long period of time and the battery went flat (or rather, the Battery Management circuitry shut it off once it hit a theashold voltage).
Batteries for these things are silly expensive (which makes sense since the scanner itself is silly expensive). So, having nothing to lose, and the battery having markings for 4.4V charge voltage, I figured what the hell, and hooked it up to my bench PSU with 4.4V charging voltage, and 100mA charging current. The outer pins are marked + and -. I figured this might be possible because the manual indicated that if the battery won’t charge in the unit, you can throw it in the charging cradle (which has a dedicated battery charge slot).
Initially, got 0.00mA current, but I rigged up the connection to stay (with my magnifying lamp holding the probes in place), and walked away. About 30 mins later I circled back and it was taking a charge!
I left it that way for about 3 hours and it got up to about 3.9V. I stopped the charging and plugged it back into the scanner, and dropped the scanner on the Qi pad. Boom, it started charging! About 2-3 hours later, the light on the unit turned green (meaning fully charged)!
So, long story short, if you have one of these, might be worth trying to hook it up a PSU and give it a go. Just remember 4.4V and a relatively low current (in my case, I stuck to less than 0.1C, but you can probably go as high as 0.3C, I just didn’t want to overheat anything should it suddenly start conducting.
