These days it is rare for a phone to be able to be used without a battery. The reason is that the max energy consumption when the CPU and GPU are running 100% exceeds the wattage that the device can accept over USB PD.
I was pleased to discover my old PinePhone allows this. It makes development much easier when having to swap the SD card every few minutes, and allows for simple power cycle via USB switch.
What I cant figure out is how to detect power usage from the PMIC when in that configuration. ie seems to still assume power draw happens via a battery.
That can't be true right? PD (and some Chinese standards) have insane wattage allocation/allowances, there's no way that a mobile CPU can pull over that amount, it's more that they don't support it.
While I’ve seen plenty of swollen and deformed phone batteries, I’ve never personally seen one that has burned. Obviously it’s happened in the past with certain phone/battery models, but I’d imagine that it’s actually very rare now days?
On the other hand, I have seen cheap 18650s spontaneously start smoking even when they weren’t plugged in to anything…
I would have hooked the smartphone to a small solar panel. The natural daylight cycle would have made sure that the smartphone kept having charging and discharging cycles.
I doubt the traffic hitting it would be sufficient to drain the battery overnight.
All of the controllers do that! But then battery starts to self-discharge, eventually a controller detects "huh, the battery is no longer charged" and start charging again.
Over years, this can accumulate enough charging cycles so battery gets worn down.. And old batteries have even higher self-discharge, so the cycle accelerates. If you are lucky, the battery lasts long enough. If you are unlucky, you end up with "spicy pillow". If you are super unlucky, and charger's temperature sensor fails (or was never installed), or battery gets punctured - you got a fire.
Not all of them apparently. I'll have to dig for a schematic(they exist, but places want money), but it seems my Dell laptop from 2019 uses the embedded controller as the BMS.
As, somehow it managed to turn all four cells in the pack into pillows. Which indicates a shockingly flawed balancing system
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No actually, it is a Fairphone after all.
In short, far phone is the phone which powers far computer which is in turn served from https://far.computer
https://far.computer/how-to/
The name likely comes from “fairphone” with the “i” scraped off - see the photo: https://far.computer/
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What I cant figure out is how to detect power usage from the PMIC when in that configuration. ie seems to still assume power draw happens via a battery.
Accept, not what the power supply can supply. Cell phones aren't being made with massive laptop-sized 100W accepting circuitry.
On the other hand, I have seen cheap 18650s spontaneously start smoking even when they weren’t plugged in to anything…
I doubt the traffic hitting it would be sufficient to drain the battery overnight.
Over years, this can accumulate enough charging cycles so battery gets worn down.. And old batteries have even higher self-discharge, so the cycle accelerates. If you are lucky, the battery lasts long enough. If you are unlucky, you end up with "spicy pillow". If you are super unlucky, and charger's temperature sensor fails (or was never installed), or battery gets punctured - you got a fire.
As, somehow it managed to turn all four cells in the pack into pillows. Which indicates a shockingly flawed balancing system