Comment by jjice
4 days ago
The thing that holds me back from this is always the battery. I want to have my battery removed so that it doesn't eventually become a time bomb, but it's a pain on modern phones and I'm not even sure if they boot without. The mobile hardware reuse space can suck for hobbyists.
Most phones can have battery removed somewhat destructively, but without affecting the rest of the phone.
Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely - the battery management on board will keep it in a state where its a constant charge which means the chemistry will be stable.
There were several generalizations in that statement that align with my similar fears to the OP. Most firmware should minimize the charge cycling, most batteries should be stable at constant charge... most isn't great for something that I want to sit in the corner undisturbed for a decade just chugging along - I have a few old desktops I use whenever I need a stand alone server or to host something web-live for a while. They'll eventually have hardware failures, but I have a lot more confidence that when they fail it won't be dramatic or destructive - ditto with old laptops, the serviceability expectations are much higher than phones so I have yet to meet a laptop I can't pop open and just pull the battery out of to run on AC alone - in the case of a power failure the UPS can't cover I'd rather the machine just power off rather than needing to deal with the possibility of dramatic failure.
I think if you're considering re-harvesting old devices to use for hosting and get far enough down your list to get to phones then you've likely got enough constant maintenance costs in overseeing things that the additional worry of fire risk just isn't worth it.
What makes your UPS any less of a fire timebomb?
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Every old hardware needing a fan is also a silent fire risk.
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> Generally, as long as you keep the phone plugged in, the battery should be safe virtually indefinitely
What is your source on this?
I've replaced the battery in always-plugged-in iPhone 3 times over 10 years because it was expanding into a spicy pillow.
I too want a way to run phones directly off of USB power, without a battery present.
Go to ifixit.com, look up your phone's battery replacement steps, stop half way through :)
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I'm not educated enough in this area to have any expertise, however, in my personal experience leaving a lithium-ion battery plugged all the time results in scary semi-exploded batteries that also stop working.
Would you say this is a chemistry/QA problem? Have there been advances in battery / controller technology that achieves the above?
Yeah I was about to say the same thing! I leave my steam deck plugged in all the time (it is my main computer) and the battery still popped (valve replaced it for free ofc)
How uh, does one find out about battery problems? I almost exclusively use laptops, and I tend to leave them plugged in most of the time. I don't want a sudden lithium-ion battery fire. Can I detect ahead of time that things are going bad?
(My current machine is a Thinkpad P52 if it matters, but I also use older Macbooks and newer Thinkpads and older Dell machines this way, although they're plugged in less often these days.)
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Of the six old Android phones I have around, two of them I don't dare turn on due to swollen batteries. I guess it depends how old the devices are whether this was a real risk, but I won't leave devices plugged in anymore for this reason.
Depends on your phone. Just has to replace the battery on a generally always-plugged in Moto (at least after a certain age). Battery had pillowed out. It's acting as our "landline" with a link2cell on some old DECT handsets.
if the power resets, the phone will boitloop without a battery?
You could try to fake a battery instead: https://yaky.dev/2022-09-06-smartphone-without-battery/
(This is for a removable battery, but should be close for built-in ones too, I suppose)
Place the "server" into a shoebox. Place another shoebox on top, filled with sand. Tape together and hide behind a furniture.
So the phone effectively becomes a 4U rack server that's probably not much of a fire hazard. We'll tuck it away behind some wood for extra safety. Never liked sleeping with my eyes shut anyway!
Then put that in a garage at least 50ft away from your home
Next, fully encase the garage in concrete. Surround it with a ring of jagged concentric spikes and skull symbols to warn future archaeologists.
They don't boot without it, but you can make it think that there's a battery by connecting power directly to the battery pins [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM&pp=ygUYZ3JlYXRzY...
Red Magic can be set to not use the battery when the power cable is plugged in. (it is to avoid heating issues and not degrade the battery)
In theory, you can replace the battery with a chunky enough capacitor (to get past the power-on surge) and a power source at the right voltage attached right where the battery would go. The soldering points are way too tiny for my amateur soldering skills, though.
> I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another battery puffing failure - at last not in the next 2 or 3 years before I left.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021233
Check out this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM
hopefully "bypass charging" becomes more of a thing in the future. a few of the latest pixel phones use it but the only other time ive seen it is on tablets aimed at gaming