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Rendered at 15:26:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
I had a little fleet of phones doing some IoT-like operation but they eventually all went offline, restarted, or just developed wonky issues.
Cell phones simply do not like being powered on 24/7 and actively doing things - they are used to being used for a bit, then off. It gets worse as the battery ages, of course - and maybe that's the main reason for the failures.
Oh my god please tell me someone remembered to throw the toilet-water-rice out and not accidentally use it for cooking X-(
If only we had truly unlimited data plans to go with it
If you want help getting this setup for yourself, let me know; happy to help.
I did. Several old devices of mine died like that.
At higher voltages the passivation layer at the cathode, necessary for the battery to function, becomes unstable and decomposes.
Edit: actually looking at the logs, it looks like Cloudflare caching is off or isn't working; everything you see is served up by the phone.
several pages on the site direct you to this service which seems to be a web server smashed together with some buzzwords and crypto services.
> Researchers at the University of California San Diego are planning a 2,000-phone computing cluster to support computer science classes such as Parallel Computation and Systems Programming. Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class, with grading latencies below the default AWS backend. A 2,000 phone deployment will be capable of supporting a hundred such classes at once.
https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515336
I do think there is huge potential here for things like running lots of semi persistent agent harnesses. The work time is currently massively dominated by the remote LLMs, so running on old phones would be cheap and because of Amdahl's Law it wouldnt really be much slower.
> I have a fair bit of experience with charging batteries of many types, and with confidence I can say that these concerns are largely overblown. Any appropriately designed battery charging system will stop charging the battery once it's fully charged.
Tell that to the multitude of laptops I've owned and/or repaired because the battery swells up and pushes the keyboard and trackpad out of the chassis.
I guess my advice is "don't use a really old and worn out battery for this". Otherwise it's probably fine? People walk around all day with one in their pocket and sometimes their ear after all.
Android 16 also has native limiting under Settings > Battery > Battery Health > Charging Optimization > Limit to 80%
> so there's little (not nothing, but little) to go wrong.
Yes, but if "going wrong" means your house burning down (because the phone overheated while you were away), most people will try to avoid even the slightest possibility of that happening, because people are generally pretty attached to their house/flat/whatever and its content.