This post is an update of the second part of my Moto server series: https://lemmy.zip/post/72142441
Rumor has it that keeping an 8-year-old phone permanently plugged in with its equally ancient Li-ion battery might not be the greatest idea ever conceived.
Some even claimed that a phone needs a battery to work.
Very negative people.
Anyway, I removed it.
Pettyl did not care.
nginx: UP PHP-FPM: UP MariaDB: UP WordPress: UP cloudflared: UP sshd: UP
The battery is currently sitting next to the phone, contributing absolutely nothing to the project.
Pettyl is now running entirely from USB power, at around 37°C, while continuing to serve the website like this is completely normal.
There is, however, one tiny detail the haters may enjoy:
It can’t boot without the battery.
So the official Pettyl disaster recovery procedure is now:
- Insert battery
- Boot Pettyl
- Connect USB power
- Remove battery
- Pretend this is enterprise infrastructure
The battery is no longer a battery.
It is the starter motor.
I see no problems with this architecture.
Anyway, Part 3 is going great.
Since when does a phone need a battery to run? It needs power, doesn’t matter where the power comes from.
well ACKSHUALLY 🤓☝️
Unfortunately Pettyl is stupid enough to need the battery to boot, but smart enough to forget about it immediately afterwards.
I don’t make the rules, I just host WordPress on an 8-year-old Motorola.
Since their burst power consumption started using more current than a capacitor in the charging circuitry could provide
Fun fact, this is also why Macbooks, at least some models, throttle the CPU if the battery is missing. My old Macbook went from 2.4 GHz to 800 MHz without the battery.
Yeah, what he said. I was just about to say the exact same thing…
I once soldered a usb wire into the terminals where the battery of my moto g4 used to be, and it kept crashing on boot. So I added a large capacitor right across the terminals, and even with that and being at 5V (on a 5 amp supply), some apps still overloaded it and got it to crash.
Would love if there was some package that just attached like a battery with a usb wire coming out the bottom, that could supply any spikes if the usb provided enough average power.
It’s not just the spike, but the battery is supplying more power than the adapter for sometime extended periods of time. It would take an expensive, or very large, capacitor bank to hold enough power to accomplish that for very power intensive apps. Capacitors are good at charging and discharging quickly and lasting many more cycles than a battery, but no where near the capacity.
What you really need to know is exactly how much power the battery can provide and adjust the power supply to be able to supply that on demand and just enough capacitor capacity to smooth out the initial spike until the power supply gets the power up. I haven’t done the research to know the exact amounts, but I have a lot of experience with electrical and electronics in general, both professionally and amateur. So I could probably build it if o knew the exact specs.
That or adjust the phone firmware to limit the processor and GPU speeds, but that’s only possible on some phones that have code available and a way to root it without some hardware switch killing the phone permanently.
*glances at compressor capacitor
Yeah, exactly…large. Bigger than the phone, definitely not going to fit inside the phone.
It’s something about how the charging circuitry is constructed. I’ve asked a handful of electrical engineers about it but they’ve never given me a good answer. My guess is that it’s easier/cheaper to design and build a circuit that only powers the phone off the battery, and only uses DC to charge the battery.