Playing around with my old Samsung Galaxy S7 today to finally put it into the BOINC farm. Tests with it and the old Ace J5 running via a USB hub showed poor results - the hub simply doesnt pass enough current. It was at this stage I noticed that the J5s battery was badly swollen.
As luck would have it, I knew I had a spare Buck converter. So, the J5 is now powered directly from the 12V shack PSU via a DC-DC Buck converter and a pair of sensing resistors, same as the old dog currently direct powered.
That makes 8 CPU cores running 24/7 under direct power, and a further 8 cores running 24/7 on USB on the S7.
At some stage of course the S7's battery will start to fail, and so another Buck converter will be needed. It makes sense then to now start looking at ways to make a much tidier job of the farm, and design a suitable mount to hold the devices, their regulators, and a dedicated SMPSU.
The only other awkward thing is working out which device is which on the BOINC stats pages!
