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Continuous power vs timed charging for remotely deployed smartphone

Hi everyone,
I'm a total newbie at this, so forgive if my questions are unclear. I'm designing an external power pack to power remotely deployed smartphones that will be used as timed cameras for wildlife monitoring. The goal is to have them deployed for 3-4 weeks at a time before checking on them. The cell phone battery lasts ~6 days (airplane mode except 1 wake-photograph-transmit session per day). My current plan is to hook up a pair of 3000mah 18650 lipo batteries in parallel to a voltage step up usb DC board, which i've done and it works fine, charging the phone battery quickly. My question is whether I should add in a timer cycle relay board so that the phone is not continuously charging on the external batteries, and is instead (for example) on a cycle, draining slowly for 20 hours, followed by 4 hours charging from the external batteries. I was imagining this would be better if the phone would still be drawing charge from the external batteries even when at full charge, but perhaps it would know not to do this? It would also maybe be better for the internal phone battery to discharge some each day? Are there any other things i'm not thinking of? Thanks for any advice you can provide!
 
I think ypu have it backwards. It would be better to power it continuously. Once the batteries are charged, they will not draw any further current, and all of the power for the phone will come from the power bank.

If you cyclically charge and discharge the batteries, you are wasting about 20% of the battery energy because charging is not 100% efficient.

Bob
 
I think ypu have it backwards. It would be better to power it continuously. Once the batteries are charged, they will not draw any further current, and all of the power for the phone will come from the power bank.

If you cyclically charge and discharge the batteries, you are wasting about 20% of the battery energy because charging is not 100% efficient.

Bob


Thanks, Bob!
 
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