Based on the work the person has done, if they wanted to make something with an exceedingly long battery life, and the battery setup there already seems to be basically a 1S li ion, they could graft in a back side battery holder for two high quality 18650 cells in parallel. It would probably last weeks.

A 10000mAh pouch battery would take up less room and provide more battery life. They are almost as cheap as 18650s too.

The neat thing about 18650s though is that you can put a battery door on it and make them swappable, if a person used a holder that can accommodate button top protected 18650 cells. The same cells can also be shared by a bunch of good quality flashlights and headlamps. I have several extremely useful headlamps from "sofirn" that take my choice of cell and have a built in USB-C charging port and charge circuitry protected behing a gasket and twist-open ip67 sealed cap. The pouch battery would be better as an integrated all in one product but also makes the thing a bit less modular.

There are advantages in some applications, it’s just not a one size fits all tool. Slim devices aren’t really a good fit for them. They make sense in round devices (like a flashlight) or larger devices where space isn’t as much of a concern.

Thank you to both solder-nerds for contributing strongly to the thread, please don’t fight.

No fighting intended, I think it's interesting to see that there's many ways of doings things, and doing a sort of mental whiteboard exercise on what the benefits and drawbacks of different things are... Like, using cylindrical cells would let me share cells with my head lamp, swap cells, independently charge cells and keep spare charged cells ready.

While using a pouch cell keeps the profile much more slim, portable, still has opportunities for really high capacity in watt hours, and allows for a more robust case design that doesn't have the structural weakness of a battery door.

And if you put the pouch cell on a set of wires with a small pluggable connector to the main PCB (and a case that can screw open/shut) it's still an item the user can replace with 5 minutes and a screwdriver if it wears out from many cycles over a period of years.

How is a 10000mAh pouch more energy dense than an 18650?

By not having void air space in between cylindrical cells like you'd get with two 18650s? It's mostly just a matter of packaging.

Pouches can be made to have better volumetric density than cylindrical cells quite easily, which is why laptops aren't generally full of cylinder cells anymore; the challenge is just providing them enough external support/compression and swelling allowance, which can be accomplished through chassis design.

Pouch cells are lighter per mAh due to the lack of metal casing. But more than the casing, the form factor is better for a pocketable device. The cylindrical form factor sticks out, usually wastes some space, and can’t be neatly tucked behind a board or display.

This is really nice! It so happens that I’ve just bought a $10 4G dongle [1], guess I’ll have to check what’s inside now :-)

[1]: like this: https://img.joomcdn.net/ea91b4418997d83d802339fad0bbcf878b9d...

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Aside, but it appears some MSM8916-based dongles run Android UI despite having no display: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots

I often ditch my phone and carry my hotspot device for my internet. The only drawback is that for viewing my texts and OTPs i end up putting the sim in my phone or opening up the web interface on my laptop. This seems to work very well as a dumbphone per se.

How do you check sms/OTP/text using web interface on your laptop?

This probably depends on your particular dongle model. Back in 3G era, some carriers offered USB modems with SMS locked out in the firmware, but you could flash a firmware from a different operator (also install their variant of software, the only difference being the added SMS tab and a different skin) and then you can text and even use USSD! (No calls, though.)

https://messages.google.com/web/ is one way I'm aware of, I'm sure there's others depending on the messages app used.

It seems those modems run Android 4.x with the stock messaging app: https://github.com/u0d7i/uz801#screenshots

But I guess you can install a custom messaging app that would sync the messages? (If there’s one that still supports such an old version of Android)

This is a really cool project! A mini cyberdeck that doesn't seem too impractical to use. Repurposing the Clicks keyboard is a genius idea.

It would be pretty cool to put Hermes Agent or some agent system on that thing, assuming the OpenStick build has enough RAM/storage. That would be fire.

Truly, I couldn't imagine a worse platform to put a coding agent on. What even would be the point?

It's got less than 512GB of RAM, no package manager, and virtually no storage.

OpenStick is super old though, there are Linux and OpenWRT builders that track the upstream kernel, check hkfuertes and others.

Really cool!