Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server | Hacker News Reader

Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server

offthebricks.com

> Undoubtedly at least one of the readers of this story will raise alarms at the prospect of keeping a lithium battery on full charge all of the time. It's a fire hazard! It can explode!

> 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.

Yeah, it's not a matter of stopping charging, that is a necessary but not sufficient condition to stop the battery from exploding. It's generally keeping the battery fully charged and hot inside a device that's always plugged in and always on that does them in like this over time.

Ah, yeah, like MSI does - the only way to set a charging limit is to install windows and their malw....ummm, bloatware, to switch one thing in EC (yeah, out of curiosity I checked various Linux-based attempts but it looks like they're not baked at all or sometimes messing up the bios settings)

Author here. All good points from this point and its replies, which to me says best to me that not all products and experiences are equal, so proceed based on your comfort level.

Note that the app is capable of monitoring both battery charge percentage and temperature. If one was inclined a USB to serial adapter with some simple circuitry could be used to monitor and control the state of charge. Good idea for a follow-up project and article!

I've had a phone with a swollen battery that I swear was not swollen when I chucked it in the drawer a year or two earlier. Apparently it's the battery itself breaking down that causes this, so I don't think any electrical protection scheme would necessarily help you.

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.

There are apps that can limit the charge %, or using something like Tasker to cycle a smart plug.

Android 16 also has native limiting under Settings > Battery > Battery Health > Charging Optimization > Limit to 80%

My phone seems happy with the 80% setting, but my laptop went through 3 batteries before I decided to rip it out and only run the thing off the wall wart.

Also:

> 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.

Google had a lovely related article recently of data centers built around many old stripped down phones. The main focus seems to be a university experiment,

> 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.

It's a cute dream to have - running some kind of webserver/API/IoT service off an old phone, but in my experience it's not as easy as it sounds.

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.

I've been running this web server for over a year with no stability issues like that. The app itself shutting off was the biggest issue, but the alarm plugin reboots it whenever that happens. Perhaps you had a bad batch of phones but in my case, it's been very reliable.

"then later dropped in a toilet before sitting for over a year in a bag of rice"

Oh my god please tell me someone remembered to throw the toilet-water-rice out and not accidentally use it for cooking X-(

Author here. What boiling water doesn't take care of all that ;)

< that's the nearest I can get an award!

Toilet rice builds character.

I’ve been dreaming of this (generally speaking) for years. Just occurred to me I could easily do it myself now too with modern tools…

If only we had truly unlimited data plans to go with it

Author here. I'll admit that I have made limited use of AI for helping in areas that I'm less familiar with (like FTP protocols), but I haven't paid a dime; all free plan. I'll use AI to help make the project possible, but it's not trustworthy enough to make things readable and maintainable.

If you want help getting this setup for yourself, let me know; happy to help.

> There's also some suggestions out there that leaving a lithium ion battery fully charged will degrade its max capacity over time; I haven't seen any evidence of that in practice,

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.

Interesting; good to know.

This is awesome! The page looks good, and is nicely optimized. Is the phone serving the whole site? I noticed that the backgound image fades in, is it serving that too?

Glad you like it! The phone serves everything. In this case Cloudflare will be helping with some caching, but it's not required.

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.

This is a advertisement for a service called qik "Next step is to pick a Qik Node to run your web services, and host your apps. There are official Qik Nodes "

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.

Author here. Qik is the name I've given to the project. It's pretty clear on all the pages that it will always be free, and that there's no reference anywhere to any crypto services. Give specifics if you think otherwise; there's lots of noise these days, so I'm not offended you figured this was another one.

Ah my apologies. what a sensible answer thanks for explaining.

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