4 ms·
Smartphone without a battery (2022)
- 0xb83c 10mo ago[dead]
- fer 10mo agoRelated (and on the frontpage): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239177
- yaky 10mo agoLooks like someone else posted this one though :)
- fsflover 10mo agoI'm happy that my smartphone, Librem 5, can already run without a battery.
- 31337Logic 10mo agoHuh? What do you mean? Their own product page states that it comes with a 4,500mAh User-Replaceable battery.
- Wowfunhappy 10mo agoI assume GP means that it’ll work with no battery connected if plugged in.
- fsflover 10mo agoCorrect.
- autoexec 10mo agoCan it reliably send and receive calls and texts yet though? https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/11ho5xo/the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly_a_few_months_w/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/11ho5xo/the_good_th...
- fsflover 10mo ago> T-Mobile would have to white list the phone for it to work. This is a real pain, especially since I have been needing to field some really important calls lately. I guess, there is nothing you can do if your provider bans your hardware. > it seems like it drops to 2g for the call This means, the poster is using an outdated modem firmware, which should be upgraded by contacting Purism (AFAIK Purism isn't allowed to freely distribute it). Calls seem to work fine for me.
- stavros 10mo agoI came here to be dismissive ("power is power, what's the big deal?"), but this is a legitimately useful guide on how to fake a battery. Thanks for this.
- jwong_ 10mo agoI have a box full of old unique phones that while I technically can get replacement batteries, the replacements have generally been awful and bloated very quickly. I will have to give a go at this guide to extend some life to these phones
- cl3misch 10mo ago> Basic phone charger <1A USB power supply was not enough to even finish booting, but a ~2A was enough to boot and launch octo4a So it's drawing >1A over a single diode? Let's say 1.4A and 700mV voltage drop over the diode, then it's roughly 1W over the diode. Won't it get pretty hot?
- ZiiS 10mo agoThe diagram calls it a 1N4001 which is rated to sustain 1A (but 40% over is probably fine). A safe 1N5400 would still be pennies.
- mystifyingpoi 10mo agoAuthor should've just used a $1 adjustable buck converter with USB-C in. There would be no issues with heat, or the need for a big capacitor even.
- SirFatty 10mo agoI see the author implemented a true circuit board.
- wiseowise 10mo agoIt is criminal that supercomputers in our pockets have expiration dates. Even cheapest phone these days is hundreds times more powerful than PS2, has better camera on par or better with most feature phones back in the days and cellular/wifi. They can be used for detection, automation or just plain fun/gaming. But no, you can't install Linux to overcome bloated, insecure abandonware (old Androids, iOS). Built-in, hot pillow of a battery that is pain in the ass to remove and even then it can't work without it.
- 747-8I 10mo agoI understand. I got a Linux phone & its remarkably decent - its called Jolla https://jolla.com/ https://jolla.com/
- bobim 10mo agoI need to know if this is running e-banking a.k.a. "we are secure, yet is that you that made this payment" apps?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- everdrive 10mo agoPeople are nuts, that's all there is to it. They're worried about thinness, but meanwhile buy phones that are so tall and wide they cannot actually fit in a pocket. There's no benefit whatsoever to the thinness, except that someone else's phone is thicker. And no, water damage is not a concern. You can absolutely build phones with a battery compartment that can safely be fully submerged in water.
- stronglikedan 10mo agoI have a 6.9 inch screen, which is the biggest if not extremely close, and it fits in my pocket just fine. It fits well because it's so thin.
- rashidujang 10mo agoTangentially related, I have recently been using my S10+ as a makeshift media server running Jellyfin in Termux. The main problem I had was that it is unsafe to keep a device perpetually charging and my first thought was to create a Routine to turn on the charger when the battery is above a certain threshold and off when it is below. This post gives me an alternative idea to try.
- leke 10mo agoI have an old Samsung that runs Android 4.4 and runs directly from USB without a battery. It's a shame phones don't do this anymore.
- summermusic 10mo agoWe have a 64-bit Toshiba tablet mounted on the wall in our kitchen that works wonderfully as a control surface for HomeAssistant. The battery was easy to remove and it runs off of its own barrel plug connector. We were thinking to reproduce this in our hallway, but all the spare touchscreen devices (tablets and phones that were our own and from family/friends) have these integrated batteries, and research seems to suggest that none of them will work without a battery anyways, so we are going to attempt to do something like this with an old iPhone or Android phone. We have some PinePhones lying around that have removable batteries and run just fine without them, but alas they are so underpowered that they can't really run the bloated HomeAssistant web portal, and we don't want to write a custom frontend.
- progforlyfe 10mo agoI love stuff like this. There must be millions of similar old Android devices that can still perform tasks like this, or even tiny web servers. Similar to what raspberry PIs are used for, but more powerful.
- ninalanyon 10mo agoThe 1N4001 diode is only rated at 1 A but the article says that the phone draws 2 A at times. Might be worth using a higher rated diode or two in parallel for greater reliability.
- BizarroLand 10mo agoIt will probably be fine, since the 1N4001 is also rated for temporary spikes to 30A. "For 1N4001 Diode, the maximum current carrying capacity is 1A it withstand peaks up to 30A." https://components101.com/diodes/1n4001-diode-pinout-datasheet https://components101.com/diodes/1n4001-diode-pinout-datashe... They're also cheap as chips, so worst case if it blows they can swap out for 2 of them like you suggest.
- ninalanyon 10mo agoThe 30 A rating is for a non-repetitive half cycle of 60 Hz, aka 8.3 ms. If the phone is drawing 2 A while booting that's much more than 8.3 ms. Obviously it does survive in the application described in the post but it seems like pointless penny pinching to not choose a suitably rated device especially when the article itself talks about inrush current overloading other parts when the 1000 uF capacitor was discussed.
- anonymousiam 10mo agoLast month I opened a drawer and found my Google Nexus One smartphone. It hadn't been turned on for 10 years and I figured the (easily removable) battery was done. I tried charging it anyway and to my surprise, it actually recovered and charged. It worked fine when I turned it on, but it's essentially a paperweight now because the US mobile carriers have all upgraded to 5G, and this is a 3G phone. The thing that struck me while doing this is just how tiny the Nexus One is. It's a full-featured (for the day) smartphone, but it's less than half the size of pretty much all the mainstream smart phones today. Battery life was decent, and the apps were pretty functional. My current phone is about twice the length, 50% wider, and twice as heavy. Battery life has been getting progressively worse with background apps draining your battery so they can scoop up and market whatever information about you they can. Battery life has also been impacted by the BLE tracking features, which run all the time. I wish I could upgrade the Nexus One with a 5G radio -- it would be a great phone today.
- mystifyingpoi 10mo agoSame here with Samsung J6. Super thin and light, removable battery, SIM card, microSD, and of course headphone jack. Would be great for everyday use, currently relegated to playing a single white noise .mp3 for kids to sleep.