An update on the Farphone's battery
31 comments
·November 28, 2025cretinoid
bayindirh
Your answer lies on https://far.computer
In short, far phone is the phone which powers far computer which is in turn served from https://far.computer
gassi
> this webpage is hosted on a drawer-bound fairphone 2, running postmarketos
null
Reason077
While I’ve seen plenty of swollen and deformed phone batteries, I’ve never personally seen one that has burned. Obviously it’s happened in the past with certain phone/battery models, but I’d imagine that it’s actually very rare now days?
On the other hand, I have seen cheap 18650s spontaneously start smoking even when they weren’t plugged in to anything…
prmoustache
I would have hooked the smartphone to a small solar panel. The natural daylight cycle would have made sure that the smartphone kept having charging and discharging cycles.
I doubt the traffic hitting it would be sufficient to drain the battery overnight.
aziaziazi
an even smaller https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ ?
bbarnett
[flagged]
dang
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
TechoChamber
[flagged]
jraph
dang doesn't deserve any hate, and I bet the vast majority of us appreciate his incredible work.
growt
I have multiple devices with lithium batteries plugged in 24/7. A kindle that I use as a display for example. So far nothing exploded. If exploding kindles were a thing I guess I would have heard.
lisper
I have not had anything explode, but I have had Macbook batteries expand on me on two separate occasions to the point where the case was visibly warped. Both times I was away from home, so it was extremely inconvenient.
Telaneo
The fact that they can doesn't mean they will.
On older devices the controller might make some assumptions that holds true with a new battery, but very much doesn't with an old and worn one.
My Macs have all been sensible about it, but I've seen Windows machines with batteries that just died from being plugged in all the time not even 10 years ago. Even if that specific instance was just a bad battery and not due to a charge controller, I have no faith in Random Windows or Android OEM Number 582 doing this correctly.
For devices that are fixed, I'd prefer to eliminate the potential of there even being a problem in the first place.
oceanplexian
There’s basically zero risk for these cell phone batteries outside of freak accidents, speaking as someone who who’s been building packs since pouch cell Lipos first started coming out for model airplanes back in 2008/2009.. That’s because in a single cell configuration, there’s no way for the charge controller to run up an imbalance and overcharge one of the cells.
joecool1029
I somewhat agree with you. As my last comment suggests, I have a lot of experience running phones as AP’s including phones with dual cell configurations.
Where things go off the rails is situations where extreme heat can be present (shoving phone in direct sunlight in window with hot climate is a bad move) another thing they don’t tolerate well and people don’t talk enough about this is deep discharging the batteries frequently. This causes a breakdown of the SEI membrane and makes it so future recharging generates more heat and gas. This will cause expansion and might cause a short/failure if poorly designed (galaxy note 7).
joecool1029
fwiw I’ve used 24/7/365 plugged in phones as AP’s in multiple locations for a decade or so now, never had an issue. Past few years I use the battery threshold to set them to 70% charge and they don’t move from this for months at a time.
What roasts the lifetime of my laptop batteries is compiling with gentoo, but again never an issue with catastrophic failure and I have 20+ years of experience with that as well.
daemonologist
Three times I've been lazy and set up an old phone or tablet as an always-plugged-in stationary device without excising the battery, and that has produced two spicy pillows and one completely dead battery (phone wouldn't even boot when plugged in, until I replaced the battery). Granted, these were all 5-10 years ago, but I do not trust the batteries and their controllers in these devices.
Nowadays if I want to leave a device plugged in I crack it open, remove the battery cell, solder on a power supply and capacitor, and then do the nonsense with rooted Android to keep it from shutting itself down.
bayindirh
That's silly. Batteries don't like to be kept at 100% all the time, not unlike your lungs which doesn't want to stay filled all the time (which is uncomfortable for your muscles even if you ignore the carbon dioxide).
e.g.: MacBooks discharge the battery down to 80% by using the battery even if it's plugged in by citing "Rarely used battery", and keep the battery at 80% for at least half a day, then charge it again.
Li-ion is an adversarial chemistry. You need to take care of it or the battery bites back by puffing up or losing capacity very fast, or becoming an indoor firework.
pengaru
I've gone through a dozen or so LiPo-utilizing portable devices at my property in the Mojave desert. All it takes is a single season for many of these batteries to swell up to such an extent the enclosures split open.
Ostensibly they contain charge controllers and temperature sensors, yet they're unable to prevent this outcome when the ambient temperature exceeds 110F day after day while the device stays on in a hot attic w/usb-c pd connected.
Fortunately I haven't had any burst into flames yet, but after a few years of seeing this pattern repeatedly I stopped deploying anything containing LiPo batteries at the property.
YMMV - but IMHO it's prudent to exclude these batteries from such unattended, powered 24x7 devices.
The_President
Excellent advice. Did you swap any of the cells with a different chemistry?
pengaru
Not really, there was a brief excursion in kludging a ZTE MiFi device to use a DIY NiMh pack of AA cells when it refused to stop self-destructing its OEM LiPo batteries every summer. (I use a MiFi hotspot for a cheap security camera network)
It worked as a stop-gap but I've since replaced it with a GL.Inet X300b ruggedized hotspot without any batteries.
There's no UPS for now... if I went the route of wanting uninterrupted power at the property I'd probably put a battery bank underground outside to power the entire building. It's not worth risking anything rechargeable inside the place given how hot it can get, and how long I sometimes go without visiting.
immibis
Most can, but you do get reports that sometimes they don't, and better safe than sorry.
I'd guess it would have more to do with heat, though.
The real question is "what the hell is a farphone"?