A challenge for the hardware challenged…  it doesn’t work on the battery.  

I tested the battery and it is indeed around 4v2.  So I tested the final connector and discovered 0v0.  Working my way back up the chain it turned out to be the most unlikely thing…  notice the little plastic nib sticking out. 

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Furthermore, notice that the battery cap doesn’t have a little nipple like most?
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Out with the Stanley knife…
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30cms estimates as 10cms, but hey… we are talking centimeters now.

Isn’t it always the case that we struggle over these simple things more than everything else.  The trouble is that all this kind of stuff is second nature to you, but advanced physics and logic to me.  We have what you might call an interpersonal impedance mismatch.  

To be fair, the battery issue was one of those unlikely, Sod’s Law things. There was exactly one way that you could put the battery in and have it make contact.  That was if it was not completely seated, and also it was canted in the holder.  If you disturbed it, or put it in any other way, including fully seated, it would not make contact.  

So when testing it I held the probes hard against the ends to make contact, and… of course… the battery would get pressed against the terminal too, and I’d would get a reading.  But put it all back together and measure the output at the board and I got nothing.  So Einstein figures it must be a dry joint of some sort.  So he re-melts all the joints with the iron, and still no good.  
So now I test end-to-end continuity.  Why didn’t I do that at first, as you would have done?  And there is continuity.  So now I’m really puzzled, and have to sit and think for a while.  How can there be continuity from inside the battery holder, right the way to the connector, but the power doesn’t make it from inside the battery to the end of the connector?  
Obviously it was some sort of Van der Waal force in action, so I measured the Keyson, Debye, and London dispersion forces using my portable Hadron Collider I finally figured that there was a large Dandylinium Chloride molecule stuck in the Phlogiston gate.  After that it was a piece of cake.

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