My mother has ditched an old iHome and I've, naturally, snapped it up to take it apart and build something fun out of it. Now I'm no real expert with eh..."raw" electronics, so I'm just going to remove all the useless ish and make a more condensed speaker setup.

I've got most everything how I want it, but am looking to change out this odd conductor charging mechanism [Fig. 1] with a pair of batteries or something. Now I figure this would be easier if there weren't more than a power and ground cable coming out of the charging mechanism [Fig. 2]. Do you think I could lop off the extra cables and wire the ground and power to a battery housing? This thing has been really touchy, is why I ask (if I remove the wireless card it fails to power on).

I could probably power these tiny speakers an easier way, but I'd like to see if I can't get this working.

Thanks!

The battery [Fig. 3].