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Comment by npretorius | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone ever looked into repurposing wifi devices like phones as mesh routers? Or open cell networks? They would have to always be plugged in but seems like a good start to an open infrastructure

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My biggest hurdle reusing old phones and tablets is the battery failing over time wile living on the charger. We need a project or company that makes dummy batteries that just report 100% full all the time.

Couldn’t that be done in software?

I'm imagining firmware level checks, but both directions should probably be investigated

I've seen at least one hacker do this. It's not so much the voltage but you need to provide a valid temperature sensor as well (the 3rd pin on most phone batteries).

I noticed strange power behaviour in an old phone after not using it for a period and storing it charged. It seemed to run down, and have less room at the low end between 20 and 0% charge. I'd like to do something with the phone but I am not sure if I can easily get inside and access the battery. I do have an old galaxy 2 without a battery that I could do something with but I'm not sure what.

On rooted android you can use Advanced Charging Controller (ACC) [0] to control at what levels to charge. I use it to exchange normal capacity for longevity.

[0] https://github.com/VR-25/acc/

A capacitor across the battery pins will often do the trick.

Supposedly it’s not just a software check, but the devices actually need a battery since the peak power usage can briefly exceed the chargers capabilities.

> wifi devices like phones as mesh routers?

Unless your uplink is bluetooth, it only has one wireless antenna, so you can only either connect to an AP or broadcast an AP, not both at the same time (AFAIK).

You can run a network dongle off the USB port (some phones) to have two network paths.

A phone is never going to be a great node device for a mesh network, though.

I see, that’s too bad

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