posted in Selfhosted

tradicije@tradicije@lemmy.zip
edited

Part 3: They said a phone can’t run without a battery. Unfortunately, Pettyl didn’t get the memo.

This post is an update of the second part of my Moto server series: lemmy.zip/post/72142441

Rumor has it that keeping an 8-year-old phone permanently plugged in with its equally ancient Li-ion battery might not be the greatest idea ever conceived.

Some even claimed that a phone needs a battery to work.

Very negative people.

Anyway, I removed it.

Pettyl did not care.

nginx: UP PHP-FPM: UP MariaDB: UP WordPress: UP cloudflared: UP sshd: UP

The battery is currently sitting next to the phone, contributing absolutely nothing to the project.

Pettyl is now running entirely from USB power, at around 37°C, while continuing to serve the website like this is completely normal.

There is, however, one tiny detail the haters may enjoy:

It can’t boot without the battery.

So the official Pettyl disaster recovery procedure is now:

  1. Insert battery
  2. Boot Pettyl
  3. Connect USB power
  4. Remove battery
  5. Pretend this is enterprise infrastructure

The battery is no longer a battery.

It is the starter motor.

I see no problems with this architecture.

Anyway, Part 3 is going great.

neidu4@neidu4@piefed.social

Replying to an earlier post

Anything made to be run from battery can work fine without one. Worst case scenario requires you to spoof some I²C communication to properly emulate a battery, but most devices and batteries are far dumber than that. DC is DC, and sometimes you just need to graft something on top for the other pins.

Source: My old laptops charging circuit failed, so I soldered the charger onto the battery pins instead. Then I replaced the actual battery with an Adafruit Itsybitsy 32u4 (because that what I happened to have available) that emulated the battery status of “Charging, nothing to see here, move along” and sent it via I²C

Edited ⁨⁨Sep⁩ ⁨26⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨14:29⁩⁩en