It's nice to see that it runs without battery plugged in. In my experience, even when they are connected to a charger, smartphones generally refuse to boot without a battery present.
If a device doesn't boot without a battery, one trick you can do is to replace it with a chunky capacitor. This can be enough to keep the charging/power circuitry happy while not degrading like a battery would.
I haven't tried with a smartphone, but this has worked for me with dumber devices where the power supply is basically designed as a charge circuit connected to the battery and load, and the charge circuit couldn't behave as a pure power supply stably without a battery present.
My understanding of modern (and mainstream, maybe the Fairphone isn't like this) smarphone batteries is that they include a PCB & microcontroller that talks with the main board, so I'd assume the capacitor wouldn't work.
I'm you know more about this than me though... Am I talking out of my ass?
It depends on what the problem is and how the charger behaves. There are two logical parts to the "smarts", the BMS (battery management system, that's the microcontroller bit) and the protection IC (which might be a microcontroller but it doesn't communicate with anything). Those two might be implemented on a single chip. Some batteries just have a protection IC on board, which can be ignored. If the BMS is on the battery itself, then yes, having it go missing is likely to confuse the phone.
You could also try keeping the battery PCB and just connecting the capacitor where the raw battery cell would connect.
Indeed! I still yearn for my Nokia N900. Not only could it run plugged in without a battery but, if you were fast enough, and without a charger, you could even swap batteries while the phone was running. I guess it had sufficient energy stored in its capacitors to bridge the second or two gap.
And my Nokia N95, in so far as when the battery was "flat", it still reserved enough for things like alarms to still work. The sorts of attention to detail I don't see in modern phones...
Yes, exactly. My N900 did the same - shut down the main OS when battery was low, and woke up to a special "BIOS" alarm clock using the wake time set in the main OS. It seems like there isn't much actual engineering (of this sort anyway) going into new phones, even really expensive ones.
To this day the N900 is still my favorite of all the phones I've ever used, and it's a crying shame there hasn't really been something similar in the years since.
I'm fairly clumsy, having broken my fair share of dunked/cracked phones.
Most of them would boot without batteries, as far as I recall. Friends have also modded old phones to serve as always plugged in control panels for smart homes.
That said, if you have control over the firmware, you can get them to essentially stay at 50% charge and have a low risk of overcharging, and get a UPS for "free".
How dangerous is it to leave a laptop plugged in all the time? 🤔 I use at least one old eeepc as a server, so that one is always plugged in. I also have an m1 mac with a busted screen as a desktop, so, always plugged in too. Am I building a fire hazard?
Leaving a modern device plugged in all the time isn't inherently "risky" itself. There's no risk of overcharging or anything like that. But there are two things that will cause the battery to degrade rather rapidly:
Being at 100% charge. Not being plugged in, it's just existing at 100% that is the problem. This goes for a battery left on a shelf too (although that will at least self-discharge a bit over time, mitigating the problem).
Higher temperature
Those two things, combined, will make a li-ion battery degrade very quickly compared to other combinations, and a degraded battery can become a fire risk.
The best thing to do is to configure charge limits to 80% or lower (your M1 Mac can do it with modern macOS or Asahi Linux), and to ensure there is adequate airflow so the machine doesn't get very warm. Then you will have a much happier battery. If you are using a machine mostly as a desktop, a 60-70% charge limit should do wonders for battery longevity.
Personally, I set my "workstation" laptop (my daily driver that spends most of the time plugged in in desktop mode) to 80% charge limit, and it's been holding up battery capacity quite well despite often getting somewhat warm.
A third is "charge, even once, below roughly freezing", the BMS should prevent this on most consumer electronics, but best to let batteries warm up to a reasonable temperature before charging just in case.
n=2, but both my mother and a friend at church had this happen. Mom's was to her old Intel MacBook Pro and theirs was a craptastic Worst Buy special. In their case they actually started a small fire; Mom's just got really hot and distorted, and the computer was unrepairable.
there is always a risk, but my understanding is that if the batteries start to swell that risk gets much greater, I swapped out a battery from a old laptop and the battery was badly swollen, but it was not obvious until I opened the case and compared it to the new battery.
I know at least some of the HP EliteBooks I've had have a setting in the BIOS for whether you want the full battery capacity or to preserve battery health, the latter limiting the battery to about 70% of its capacity. I'm guessing that means when my OS reports 100% it's probably 80% or so, and then 0% is probably 10%. Since I have my laptops plugged in more often than not, I tend to keep them set to the battery health setting. It's nice because I don't have to depend on a given OS having a mechanism for setting charge/discharge limits.
It seems mobile devices (both smartphones and passenger vehicles) have made this more obvious, and I think that's really good. I know I have my Android devices and EVs set to 80% max unless I'm about to want maximum capacity. One benefit of the BIOS-level setting is that it should work even when charging the laptop while powered off, but I suppose modern smartphone makers don't expect you to ever shut down your phone so an OS-level control is sufficient.
It's nice to see that it runs without battery plugged in. In my experience, even when they are connected to a charger, smartphones generally refuse to boot without a battery present.
If a device doesn't boot without a battery, one trick you can do is to replace it with a chunky capacitor. This can be enough to keep the charging/power circuitry happy while not degrading like a battery would.
I haven't tried with a smartphone, but this has worked for me with dumber devices where the power supply is basically designed as a charge circuit connected to the battery and load, and the charge circuit couldn't behave as a pure power supply stably without a battery present.
My understanding of modern (and mainstream, maybe the Fairphone isn't like this) smarphone batteries is that they include a PCB & microcontroller that talks with the main board, so I'd assume the capacitor wouldn't work.
I'm you know more about this than me though... Am I talking out of my ass?
It depends on what the problem is and how the charger behaves. There are two logical parts to the "smarts", the BMS (battery management system, that's the microcontroller bit) and the protection IC (which might be a microcontroller but it doesn't communicate with anything). Those two might be implemented on a single chip. Some batteries just have a protection IC on board, which can be ignored. If the BMS is on the battery itself, then yes, having it go missing is likely to confuse the phone.
You could also try keeping the battery PCB and just connecting the capacitor where the raw battery cell would connect.
Thanks!
Indeed! I still yearn for my Nokia N900. Not only could it run plugged in without a battery but, if you were fast enough, and without a charger, you could even swap batteries while the phone was running. I guess it had sufficient energy stored in its capacitors to bridge the second or two gap.
And my Nokia N95, in so far as when the battery was "flat", it still reserved enough for things like alarms to still work. The sorts of attention to detail I don't see in modern phones...
Yes, exactly. My N900 did the same - shut down the main OS when battery was low, and woke up to a special "BIOS" alarm clock using the wake time set in the main OS. It seems like there isn't much actual engineering (of this sort anyway) going into new phones, even really expensive ones.
To this day the N900 is still my favorite of all the phones I've ever used, and it's a crying shame there hasn't really been something similar in the years since.
I'm fairly clumsy, having broken my fair share of dunked/cracked phones.
Most of them would boot without batteries, as far as I recall. Friends have also modded old phones to serve as always plugged in control panels for smart homes.
That said, if you have control over the firmware, you can get them to essentially stay at 50% charge and have a low risk of overcharging, and get a UPS for "free".
how much do you wanna bet that all the people calling out this “issue” have a permanently plugged in work issue laptop in their home?
How dangerous is it to leave a laptop plugged in all the time? 🤔 I use at least one old eeepc as a server, so that one is always plugged in. I also have an m1 mac with a busted screen as a desktop, so, always plugged in too. Am I building a fire hazard?
Leaving a modern device plugged in all the time isn't inherently "risky" itself. There's no risk of overcharging or anything like that. But there are two things that will cause the battery to degrade rather rapidly:
Those two things, combined, will make a li-ion battery degrade very quickly compared to other combinations, and a degraded battery can become a fire risk.
The best thing to do is to configure charge limits to 80% or lower (your M1 Mac can do it with modern macOS or Asahi Linux), and to ensure there is adequate airflow so the machine doesn't get very warm. Then you will have a much happier battery. If you are using a machine mostly as a desktop, a 60-70% charge limit should do wonders for battery longevity.
Personally, I set my "workstation" laptop (my daily driver that spends most of the time plugged in in desktop mode) to 80% charge limit, and it's been holding up battery capacity quite well despite often getting somewhat warm.
A third is "charge, even once, below roughly freezing", the BMS should prevent this on most consumer electronics, but best to let batteries warm up to a reasonable temperature before charging just in case.
Hmm, I have an old Thinkpad that's currently in "retirement" as a Prometheus server. I should go see if I can fiddle with the bios.
(I'm not worried about anything getting warm since it's not actually doing anything most of the time.)
n=2, but both my mother and a friend at church had this happen. Mom's was to her old Intel MacBook Pro and theirs was a craptastic Worst Buy special. In their case they actually started a small fire; Mom's just got really hot and distorted, and the computer was unrepairable.
there is always a risk, but my understanding is that if the batteries start to swell that risk gets much greater, I swapped out a battery from a old laptop and the battery was badly swollen, but it was not obvious until I opened the case and compared it to the new battery.
I know at least some of the HP EliteBooks I've had have a setting in the BIOS for whether you want the full battery capacity or to preserve battery health, the latter limiting the battery to about 70% of its capacity. I'm guessing that means when my OS reports 100% it's probably 80% or so, and then 0% is probably 10%. Since I have my laptops plugged in more often than not, I tend to keep them set to the battery health setting. It's nice because I don't have to depend on a given OS having a mechanism for setting charge/discharge limits.
I set up a new ipad today and got the option to limit charging to 80% to preserve battery.
My previous ipad did not have that option, I do not know whether it is the reason its battery has degraded so much I had to purchase a replacement.
My BEV limits charging to 80% by default.
It seems mobile devices (both smartphones and passenger vehicles) have made this more obvious, and I think that's really good. I know I have my Android devices and EVs set to 80% max unless I'm about to want maximum capacity. One benefit of the BIOS-level setting is that it should work even when charging the laptop while powered off, but I suppose modern smartphone makers don't expect you to ever shut down your phone so an OS-level control is sufficient.
Oh no, they've removed the uninterrupted power supply!
Just kidding, it's probably for the better especially with such a fire-snd-forget service