You’re not wrong sortof.
The external battery is definitely dated. Still supported, but not commonly used. Now that all the current cockpit junction boxes are designed with charging and an internal battery in mind.
Also, since the vast majority of external battery holders have been in the wild many of them are reaching the end of their service life (as are many of the batteries).
You can still get a new one and they still work, but that doesn’t really make them current.
Apparently that charging port is just a regular old 2-wire port with a different connector so you don’t need to do the deal with juggling a dummy plug when you attach a regular etube wire into the system.
(I’m not sure just what can wear out on the battery holders? If you’re not doing rando miles, the batteries are only taken out and replaced maybe twice a year.)
Is it on the Shimano website?
Yes: current
No: not current
Okay.
VW parts for my 1990 VW are available new from the dealership. Current? I guess so.
Current generation product is 8000/9000 series. Simple answer
The 8000/9000 series are pusher, dangler, and brifters. All the other stuff is non-series. If you’re going to have a pure 8000 series group it will stay in really good condition because to make a usable transmission you’ll have to use a fistful of non-series components (which apparently are outdated? Because they aren’t 8000/9000 series?)
All I’m saying is that I’ve seen an uptick in bricked external battery hardware.
And Shimano reengineered the cockpit box specifically because the external battery was destined to be a legacy part.
Let’s not also forget exactly why this is even coming up. The current way to update firmware is via the current junction box and interface. There’s a reason Shimano combined charging and updating into a single tool. Because they knew the external battery was going to vanish overnight at the OE level and become a relic found on oddball setups piloted by the denizens of obscure fixie forums.
To @motorbacon ‘s point. If it ain’t specced as part of a R8070 or M8070 group on a complete bike that comes out of a box,it ain’t current.
Actually bricked, or v1 stuff that won’t work with v3 firmware and fuck you because the internal battery charger/interface needs to talk to an a junction before it will even break wind?
Now you’re just being silly.
Battery actually dead, so there was no power flowing to the battery mount?
Seemingly just DOA. Worked fine with a mish mash of parts right up until it didn’t. In most cases I just moved them to an internal battery to keep it simple. In another case custy got a NOS cradle and battery and was able to carry on.
It doesn’t seem like there is any forced redundancy at all. Leaving the door open for stragglers.
I lol’d
okay so it’s not current but it’s not obsolete and it’s dated but not outdated completely yet
I think the word you’ve all been casting around for is “compatible.” As in, Shimano claims to preserve firmware compatibility across multiple releases of Di2 components, including ones that aren’t the most recent (“current”). As in, a component may not be the most recently released, but newer components (and their firmware) are designed to be compatible with the older component running its most recent available firmware version.
If you’re going to be stubborn, at least be pedantic.
Hard to be pedantic when there are so few details about the architecture of the system. Shimano is as opaque as ever. All we have to go by are the experiences that folks have had.
I 'spect that there are issues around the battery, which seems simple enough, but none of us really know what, specifically the “battery” is. It has firmware, certainly. Does it include onboard charging? Is there a microprocessor, presumably, because firmware? What does it do other than provide power? How is one version substantially different from the next?
Can’t really answer those questions with the documentation available, so some degree of reverse engineering is required.
This I the battery mount I’ve got.
It’s probably the firmware on this mount. Lemme take one of my battery mounts and hurl it into the mail for you to try out.
Bicycles shouldn’t be this complicated.
Btw I hate di2
I’d say di2 firmware shenanigans are actually way less complex then hunting for a mystery noise on a plastic bike.
It’s not really that complicated; it’s just moving some of the complexity into another domain. I’m overly familiar with computers, so it’s close to second nature for me to set up a machine with di2, and I know it’s not ANYWHERE NEAR intuitive to know that you might need to have the components coaxed into talking with each other instead of doing cable routing tweaks and the like, but it’s a relatively painless job once you know how to do it.
(Open offer; if you need help getting your di2 bits to talk to each other, I’ll do it for free(*))
(*: free, in this context, means except for shipping, because flat rate priority mail isn’t actually free)
Mystery noises are complex on any bike eh?
TC: I would have bought that .6 bong SRAM wireless group if it were in stock anywhere.
