Dummy AA battery

A dummy AA-battery allows you to 'short out' one position in a battery pack so that you can get a different voltage. For example, if you have a four-cell pack and want to power a circuit with 4.5 volts rather than 6 volts, you can replace one of the cells with a dummy battery.

Another use: Connect a power-supply into a battery pack. Just ensure you get your polarities right, and you probably need a few dummies for the other position(s) in your pack. Don't use an external power-supply AND a real battery together. That's a bad idea.

I wasn't the first one to think of this, and I found a couple of other designs on Thingiverse for it as well, but they were all missing some nuance that I wanted in my design. And given that it's just a cylinder, it's a pretty quick thing to throw together.

I made my first pass a bit better, and it works so well that I decided to share it here.

You simply string a wire through it, and loop through the holes like sewing a button and you get a good contact in most battery holders.

I looped through the positive (bump) end 3-times with 22-gauge wire and a 'Z' pattern on the negative (flat) end. Works for me.

(Need a AAA battery? You can probably scale it if you wish - careful with the hole sizes and wall thicknesses if you do.)

***Just added (Feb2021) a CR2032 dummy battery. Lots of coolness in a tiny package. ***

If you don't want to print and hand-wire the design, I've just added (March2022) it to my Tindie store for you, so you can choose AA, AAA and/or CR2032 versions there and for a few bucks I'll do it for you