It 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.
Tangentially 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.
Last 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.
We 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.
I 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
> 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?
I 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Smartphone without a battery (2022)
(yaky.dev)88 points by MYEUHD 12 December 2025 | 33 comments
Comments
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.
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.
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.
I will have to give a go at this guide to extend some life to these phones
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?