I work in a place where we have about 100 phones in a server room that we use for automated testing of mobile apps.
A few phones get chucked out every year due to bloated batteries. We’ve even had one or two explosions.
We have them well cooled now and in fireproof containers.
We try to do some power management like automatically discharging them every once in a while etc…
A lot of phones nowadays are glued shut, you'll budget for a trained repair tech to do that. They also use the battery as a giant capacitor to absorb spike draws that wall chargers cannot provide, so the modified device will need that capacity as well. Finally, there will be some radio certification ambiguity as to whether it's legal for a legal company to operate.
That said... there are Chinese rackable phone KVM thing, available on Chinese e-commerce sites, intended for social media fraud farms(faking likes, aiding account thefts, sending scam DMs, calls, SMS, etc). Taking them apart should be already common in those scenes. Reportedly those are operating at some scales globally in various third world scam malls - shopping malls by architecture, but operated by gangs and inhabited by scam shops. So it's readily possible, if necessary.
any way to find those rackable phone kvm things? My quick search came up empty. I might get someone interested in that. However, we're a very big European corporation, so "let's use social media fraud farms" and "hire talent from scam malls to build them" might not fly in a meeting :P
Took me few minutes, but looks like one query that works for these on Alibaba/AliExpress/taobao is "click farming phone". "手机 主板 服務器"(phone mainboard server) might also work in some places.
I see bunch of multi GPU crypto mining style chassis as well as just USB mass charger styled ones. This is something I just came across randomly so I have no experiences or connections for these, but hope this helps. It's kind of cool looking if it weren't for scams.
edit: note, it's not clear if they come with the phone PCBs or phones are customer supplied. The "boards" mentioned in some of listing seem to imply that it refers to adapter boards for the phones, through subtle wording
This reminded me about the recent Google blog post where they made a server farm out of a bunch of old phones:
"Prior to deployment, smartphones must be processed to remove all but the motherboard, which contains the core compute functionality. Note that the motherboard is responsible for the largest fraction of embodied carbon (approximately 50% based on internal carbon footprinting assessments), so this effort targets the most impactful components."
And they accomplished the author's first goal to run real GNU/Linux on the phones.
How did they manage to run the phones without the battery? Apparently you need to desolder the BMS from the battery, and connect a power supply to it. And I guess simulate charging via USB and discharging so it doesn't turn off because it thinks it has drawn more than its battery capacity?
It’s Google turning Google Pixel phones into servers, they were able to call in the hardware design team to work out what was essential and how to strip the devices down, and then the firmware team to be able to boot a standard Linux kernel on them. This is a very different situation to most people’s experience of trying to do out of the ordinary things with a phone.
