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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I did something similar with a first gen kindle. Some day it stopped working, I opened the enclosure to find a completely cracked-open kindle with a battery the size of a weather balloon inside.

This was about a month after I returned from a six week trip during which I kept that thing running.

Reminder that a lot of battery-powered devices really don't like to be connected to power all the time.

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> Reminder that a lot of battery-powered devices really don't like to be connected to power all the time.

Shitty ones don't, yeah. A thing you can do with those is remove the battery fully, so it's not being recharged/used at all.

No you can't. That works for laptops but not phones, tablets etc.

Yea, to avoid this I run tbis device(kindle non-touch v4) unplugged and get 3 months on a charge with a fairly new battery.

Also they don't like being kept in hot enclosures without adequate ventilation / cooling.

That's not an issue for a device like this. The typical use case is refreshing the screen once every 5, 10, 15, etc. minutes, which takes a few seconds (including connecting to wifi, downloading the data, etc.), and then spend the rest of the time in some super low power deep sleep mode, drawing maybe tens of microamps. Or maybe checking over Bluetooth LE whether to trigger an update, once every couple seconds. This will never get hot enough to the point where it would matter.

OP said that they did this with a first-gen kindle, and I would not be surprised if it had an always-on wifi connection and was processing data much more frequently then you suggest. I agree that there are plenty of ways to build this in a power-efficient way, I just want to suggest that given modern battery controllers, heat is a much more likely cause of failure then keeping the kindle plugged in all the time.

use a light timer to help https://xkcd.com/1495/

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