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.
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 have a battery powered hotspot from my provider. Like a phone, it refuses to run off usb without a battery installed. But it yells at you and shuts down when plugged in for too long. I need to have it online all the time.
I "fixed" it by plugging the charger into an old school mechanical timer. Every six hours, it runs off the battery for 30 minutes. Has been working great for 2 years.
> It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this.
There's tons of options, and the "professional" grade routers aren't much more expensive than that consumer grade AC800s. With the one I have I get a removable SIM, dual SMA antenna connectors for MIMO with the ability to have an external high gain antenna, 5 ethernet ports, and a box that runs a version of ddWRT that I have full control over.
I have a ZTE MF286D that I picked up for €80 last year.
Installing OpenWRT requires soldering wires to access the serial port, so I haven't bothered yet (the native OS works fine for what I need), but as I understand everything is supported.
> charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery
To me this seems like a common misconception. I can’t see it being true - we’d see so many more battery fires out there if this was true, including in this very case (his setup would’ve burnt down within days in that case).
Why is that such a problem if it’s apparently fine to keep phones and other small devices connected 24/7? Aren’t charging circuits standard parts? I would have expected them all to work more or less the same
- https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-...
- https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_...
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.
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.