This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read.<p>When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That's a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.
Leaving hotspots connected via USB 24/7 is a no-no, and people put some effort trying to run them without a battery:<p>- <a href="https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-to-run-without-battery-directly-wired-to-psu/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-...</a><p>- <a href="https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass/" rel="nofollow">https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass...</a><p>- <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_8000_without_battery/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_...</a><p>I feel like there's some liability on Netgear's part here: People can't be expected to know they can't leave it connected and a charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery.<p>It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this. Hotspots with batteries tend to be a lot cheaper than battery-less routers and USB dongles. The latter of which isn't even available for 5G.
I've gone through more swollen LiPo pouch batteries at my CA desert property than I can count, fortunately none have caught fire.<p>The cheap ZTE devices in particular seem especially bad at keeping the thermals within a safe range. Even with a 100% full battery they'll let the electrolyte boil if left plugged in for their charging logic to do as it wishes in a hot environment.<p>What's so frustrating is practically every consumer electronics device seems to now have some form of LiPo pouch cells in them. I wish it were normal for manufacturers to offer chunkier variants using NiMH AA/AAA cells to consumers. Instead I've been resorting to "industrial" stuff having no battery at all like the Gl-Inet X300B [0] I eventually ended up with.<p>For a while I used a hacked together pack of four NiMH AAs with a battery board stolen from the LiPo on a ZTE/AT&T hotspot that kept swelling its pack. The battery board kept the device happy enough to believe it had the proper LiPo connected. The now external AAs stayed charged more-or-less, and didn't care how hot the ambient temps got through summer. But it was a sprawling mess of wires, soldered AAs arranged like an 80s-era RC-12L saddle-pack, kept ~together with Duck tape.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x300b/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x300b/</a>
I’m not sure which SD card was chosen in the past, but I do recommend upgrading to an industrial one (and not just high endurance), and they are typically purchased through electronics components retailers/suppliers.<p>One brand I use is ATP for my ruggedized systems[0]. Yes, they may be an order of magnitude more expensive than even a high endurance from SanDisk or Samsung, but I started using these in 2015 or 2016 and found they hold in harsh terrain, tolerate brown outs (these devices are solar powered and run off of super capacitors), and JustWorks(tm).<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/atp-electronics-inc/AF64GUD4-BBBXM/12336510" rel="nofollow">https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/atp-electronics-i...</a>
I wouldn't use LiPo cells, especially consumer ones, for anything that stays on 24/7 and unattended in rural areas. LiFePo4 ones are safer and more durable although for medium/low current solar powered devices with backup battery, Lead Acid might still be a viable, cheap and very safe choice. Unfortunately the author area isn't served by broadband, so he's forced to rely on mobile connectivity, which restricts the options wrt available router devices. I would have either used a (more costly) external DC powered (no internal battery) router supplied by a 12V battery and the solar panel, or modified the portable one to work only through external supply.
Also, the author says the SD card in the Raspberry Pi developed errors. This is normal as SD cards are quite unreliable and prone to errors with time and use; I would have used a eMMC capable board, plus external disk with moderately aggressive spin down (to save power) for data storage.
The pictures do indeed speak for themselves! Goodness me.<p>What are the statistics on lithium-ion battery failures? Are they dangerous full stop, dangerous in certain scenarios (e.g. heat), or do we only hear about the failures when 99.9999… of the time they are fine as they are everywhere?<p>Are all lithium-ion batteries created the same?
My solar powered blog [1] is on LiFePo4 in part for this reason: no risk of spontaneous combustion.<p>[1]: <a href="https://louwrentius.com/my-solar-powered-blog-is-now-on-lithium-iron-phosphate.html" rel="nofollow">https://louwrentius.com/my-solar-powered-blog-is-now-on-lith...</a>
Seeing the carnage I thought that there were no fuses for devices powered from 12V lead acid battery and some few hundred amps went through device.<p>But, this is not really a failure of solar power system, just failure of a Netgear device. It seems that it used it's battery as a high current source for when it needed more peak power for wireless transmission, thus the instability and failures when just plugged to USB charger. I don't think such constant drain and constant recharge was really healthy for the battery. I wonder if it was/is stated in manual that it was supposed to be used charged and unplugged and not really as full time usage device.
I have some old phones mounted on my walls in various locations as control panels for Home Assistant. However every now and then one of them gets hot and its battery starts bulging, and I have to toss it. It's a problem even though they are (old) flagship phones.<p>I'm looking for some kind of tablet that is wall-mountable but doesn't contain a Lithium battery. Some other kind of safe battery (NiMH?) that can last through momentary brownouts and power cuts of a few minutes would be nice.
> External power was never quite enough, with enough activity the thing was liable to randomly reboot.<p>Maybe there was a fault in the circuitry to begin with.
I had a barely used first generation iPhone in my safe and went to get it the other day to show it to some friends just to discovered it had blown up. It didn't look charred as your modem but it definitely exploded. Next day I ordered a few fire retardant boxes where I put all of my lithium batteries and power banks.
I too had dreams of an all solar future, until recently when my bms had failed, I temporarily removed it so I could still have power to my well... Fast forward a few weeks and we had a frost. About $2k worth of Prismatic cells are now swelling and probably at 20% the original capacity. Ughh. I still want to do solar, but it's expensive, unreliable and... Maybe kinda dangerous if you're doing not so kosher things.
>I was actually aware this could happen and technically shouldn't have left the battery in the device while it was hooked up to power constantly<p>This really isn't on them at all, a properly designed Li-ion system will be absolutely fine left plugged in 24/7. Netgear either doesn't understand how to design a safe battery powered device, or this was a rare case of a bad battery just going off regardless of how you treat it.
I’ve had a LiPo swell on me once…it was embedded in a tracking device I used for anti theft on my car…tucked away hidden…
I always knew in the back of my mind that I should check on it since it got so hot inside…
Anyhow I sold the car and removed the tracking device and opened it up…that’s when I noticed the swollen LiPo. Counted my blessings that day.
I run a NetGear M5 in my campervan. It has a battery that is charged with the solar on the van. The thing gets stupid hot and I'm always afraid it is going to combust. I just leave the back cover off of it and put a fan on it, and that seems to help.
For the price of a mifi and a pi you can get a cellular wifi router and run code directly on there. Either from "random string of characters" on Amazon or Mikrotik or Teltonika. Then you have something designed to run 24/7 and most of them will run off DC power.<p>Of course the router isn't as nice of a software environment as a pi but that's part of the fun, no? If you want easy just use GitHub pages or square space or whatever.
This is why I cringe a little when people say "you can buy li-ion batteries for this much, therefore scaling it up to do renewable energy storage is cheap enough to do right now."
Are there any super capacitors based batterys which emulate a LiIon which won't bloat but will still act as a battery for intermittent high drain situation?
Charge level control for such devices should be standard. All my always connected devices with LiPo batteries have led to eventual bloating and safety hazards.