Fit: Withings scale needs higher voltage batteries.

Long time since posting. I’m behind with way too much learning about AI these days to post but here’s a quick one.

As few devices of mine don’t work with the many rechargeable nimh batteries I have. These are mainly electronics that need the higher voltage of 1.5V that you get with alkaline or lithium or rechargeable lipo batteries.

They include non obvious devices like my OMRON blood pressure and our brother label maker. To that I know need to add my Withings scale.

Withings Body+ Works great

For years I had a scale Body+ and it’s been great. Has WiFi and body composition as and syncs well with Apple health. But then it mysterious started to not update Apple health.

As an aside I had even before that a Weight Gurus but after a firmware update it started to not connect and then the readings were erratic so I moved on. Matures me want to try to get it working again.

Failure to connect to Wifi and setup

The failed mode is a little strange though. The measure function works fine but the symptom was that I could not find my WiFi. It would refuse to connect.

The diagnostic fortis is that nothing would air in the Withings application or the online portal and if you check the app there’s nothing there either. It’s as if the WiFi radio just needs a little more juice.

The second symptom is that it would refuse to setup properly. It would just keeping saying after you push the little button at the back “Setup failed”

The stranger thing was that I had rechargeable batteries in there for a few months before this happened so the nominal voltage required must be very close to the 1.4-1.45 these batteries put out.

I finally figured this out by pulling batteries and observing that one of them wouldn’t charge. So the overall voltage is too low. There are four AAA batteries in there so I’m assuming it needs 4×1.5V or 6V input. And it was getting more like 3×1.4V 4.2V.

When I put fresh nimh in that were confirmed working. The setup worked for about a week and then failed. I don’t have anymore lipo batteries left so I just put in Alkaline ones and all works fine.

I want to conserve but I otoh the draw on this scale is really low. It’s using a set of batteries every few years.

So if you have these problems with electronics just be aware that it