Using mobile phone as an internet radio

[tony sayer]

Not so. There aren't any obvious failure mechanisms in solid-state devices
(other than dopant migration in high-power output transistors).

Yes interesting that especially in high power RF transistors, 'tho I
believe in such cases its paralled emitter connections that start going
open circuit...

It's also true that most mechanical devices "like" moderate use. Letting
anything mechanical "sit" most of the time will probably cause it fail
sooner than if receives regular use.

It's now possible to build computers without moving parts (other than the
optical drives). My new computer has a solid-state "hard disk", and you
wouldn't believe how fast it boots up, or how fast programs start to run.

Indeed they do just got one, not in this machine but very fast indeed.
They still it seems fail though...

 

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

I don't agree but will say no more.

Laser printers. I have given away for parts several laser printers because
they sat unused 99% of the time, and started to jam when I printed the
one or two pages a month I needed them for.

Not only did the rubber wheels dry out and lose their ability to grab paper,
they flatten where they are pressed against something.

I have a perfectly good Samsung laser printer in that condition now.

My choices are to once a week clean out a jam, and clean the feed roller;
print something everyday (a waste of paper); spend $15 for a new roller
(including postage) and an hour to install it; or wait for a sale
(every 2-3 months) and buy a newer faster, higher resolution model with a
2,000 page toner cartridge included for less than the cost of a full load toner.

Geoff.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

Using anything shortens its working life.

I can vouch for the remark made but I can give you more details too:

I use smartphones, tablets and laptops to listen to internet radio all the
time and I've only had one device that suffered because of that. What
happened to that particular device is the WiFi quit working and it doesn't
even work after a factory reset.

Who knows why the WiFi quit? The radio could have failed simply because the
chip went bad.

HP has had problems with the radios in some of its notebooks.

 

[[email protected]]

You'll have dropped it well before it wears out .

You'll wear out the batteries before you drop it and you'll want the new
iThingy before the batteries die. Full employment for the phone company.

 

[Tom Kupp]

Not being able to find a small internet radio to buy we liked, we got mobile
phone with which we link with wi-fi to a modem router, and use it as an
internet radio.

Keeping the phoned plugged into its charger all the time, we are using it to
play *all-day* background classical music through an amplifier and speakers.

Since the phone has no 'moving parts' unlike a computer, we are wondering if
this continuous playing all day of the phone is going to shorten its working
life ?

Does the mobile have a subscription plan; i.e. periodic payments?

 

[§ñühwö£f]

Yes interesting that especially in high power RF transistors, 'tho I
believe in such cases its paralled emitter connections that start going
open circuit...


Indeed they do just got one, not in this machine but very fast indeed.
They still it seems fail though...

Boot times are largely a function of what gets loaded prior to showing a
"desktop". Different OS'es have different boot times. Check out Haiku
OS. I boot to a "desktop" in under a minute.

--
http://www.privacySOS.org | www.extinctioncrisis.org
www.snuhwolf.9f.com|www.savewolves.org
_____ ____ ____ __ /\_/\ __ _ ______ _____
/ __/ |/ / / / / // // . . \\ \ |\ | / __ \ \ \ __\
_\ \/ / /_/ / _ / \ / \ \| \| \ \_\ \ \__\ _\
/___/_/|_/\____/_//_/ \_@_/ \__|\__|\____/\____\_\

 

[Les Cargill]

Who knows why the WiFi quit? The radio could have failed simply because the
chip went bad.

HP has had problems with the radios in some of its notebooks.

This might be where a Knoppix disk can help arbitrate between a
software/configuration problem and a hardware failure. Any time
I have something fail, I do the "Remove Device"/"Add Device"
dance, then update drivers.

If that fails, out comes the Knoppix disk. If it *still* fails,
it's most likely hardware. I've been lucky so far and nothing
has needed a lot of scrounging for Linux device drivers.

 

[amdx]

Seems to go against the whole ethos of exercising. Never get out of bed and
live forever ...

Be sure to use all ten fingers on the tv remote, make them last longer.

 

[[email protected]]

Be sure to use all ten fingers on the tv remote, make them last longer.

The TV, the remote, or the fingers?

 

[[email protected]]

Not being able to find a small internet radio to buy we liked, we got
mobile phone with which we link with wi-fi to a modem router, and use it
as an internet radio.

Keeping the phoned plugged into its charger all the time, we are using it
to play *all-day* background classical music through an amplifier and
speakers.

Since the phone has no 'moving parts' unlike a computer, we are wondering
if this continuous playing all day of the phone is going to shorten its
working life ?

The bits that will fail [first] in a mobile phone are the battery and
display. You can replace the battery and switch off the display.

Except phones with hardwired batteries.

I have two 40+ year old solid state radios that still work.

My 39YO HP45 still works but the power switch is too flaky to be usable.

 

[Jasen Betts]

Not being able to find a small internet radio to buy we liked, we got mobile
phone with which we link with wi-fi to a modem router, and use it as an
internet radio.

Keeping the phoned plugged into its charger all the time, we are using it to
play *all-day* background classical music through an amplifier and speakers.

Since the phone has no 'moving parts' unlike a computer, we are wondering if
this continuous playing all day of the phone is going to shorten its working
life ?

It may be bad for the battery

 

[Jasen Betts]

My choices are to once a week clean out a jam, and clean the feed roller;
print something everyday (a waste of paper)

load the paper tray with scrap paper, use the bypass when you want to
print something for real.

another option is to make a document with no ink and print that each day
at the end of the week collect the blank pages from the output tray
and put them back in the input tray.

 

[chris]

Correct. SSDs are an exception. They contain "leveling" software that makes
sure the disk is written to evenly. The Crucial disk I use is spec'd at
about 40TB of total writes.

For most usage scenarios the theoretical lifetimes of modern SSDs are
longer than HDDs.

 

[George Herold]

True, but I believe that's the range expected from different types of
light bulbs (nitrogen filled, halogen, vaccuum), and not the range
expected for a given device.  I suspect that more accurate exponent
value could be empirically determined for a given device, and later
used only for that device.



<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Reducing_filamen...>
   One of the problems of the standard electric light bulb is
   evaporation of the filament. Small variations in resistivity
   along the filament cause "hot spots" to form at points of
   higher resistivity; a variation of diameter of only 1% will
   cause a 25% reduction in service life. The hot spots evaporate
   faster than the rest of the filament, increasing resistance
   at that point a positive feedback that ends in the familiar
   tiny gap in an otherwise healthy-looking filament.

Note the photo of the filament with a break in the middle.  When I was
quite young, I would break burnt out AC light bulbs to see what was
inside.  If the filament was intact, the break was always somewhere
near the middle.  If a piece broke off, one end of the broken piece
was usually near the middle.  In later years, I would look at the
remains of DC panel lights (usually type 47 for old Motorola radios)
and noted that the breaks were always near the supporting terminals,
probably due to metal migration.



So much for my anecdotal data.  My theater marquee experience was in
about 1966.  The theater actually did keep records so that they could
stock enough replacement bulbs, but I don't have copies of any of
that.

I tried Googling for similar repetative on-off tests and didn't find
anything.  If I have time, I'll try again.  I must admit that the lack
of test data does look suspicious.  Perhaps sending the idea to
Mythbusters and have them runs a test?


Oops.  I thought it was plated.




No, not fabricated.  It's my reliance on my memory in an area that I'm
not familiar with.  I tried Googling for the wire used, couldn't find
much, and made a bad guess.  The plating came from somehow getting
thorium coated tungsten wire used in vacuum tubes mixed up with light
bulbs.  Sorry for the errors and muddle.


--
Jeff Liebermann     [email protected]
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558- Hide quoted text-

- Show quoted text -

Hi Jeff, Phil. First I know nothing about incandescent bulbs.
But how about this as a model of why turning bulbs on and off might
cause them to fail sooner.

1.) I think we all observe that bulbs tend to blow when you turn them
on.
(unless you knock the lamp over or something.)

2.) I assume that the failure is mostly due to the thinner ‘hot spots’
on the filament. Thinner regions heat up faster (higher resistance
with equal current).

3.) Now even if the thinner region doesn’t blow, it still gets hotter
and loses a bit more tungsten than the rest of the filament. (For
that small amount of time that it’s turning on.) But still this means
that turning on the bulb causes the thin region to become a bit
thinner.

And that’s it. Repeated on and off means that the thin region has a
higher average temperature than the thick part of the filament. It
evaporates faster and fails sooner.

George H.

 

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

refills are commonly available and cheap. The printer cannibals sell
used parts and assemblies fairly cheap on eBay. Also, expertise is
more easily found:
<http://www.fixyourownprinter.com>
My favorite printer of the week is the HP 2300DN or DTN at between $90
to $220 used depending on condition and options. Favorite feature is
double sided (duplex) printing.

Problem with that is my location. Shipping anything from anywhere except
China is too expensive to make it worth while. A $10 (postage included)
Samsung feed roller is worth buying, a part that does not fit in an envelope
and has to go in a USPS box costs 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of a cheap Samsung
printer. UPS/DHL/FDEDX double or tripple that price.

Also to be honest, the loss/theft rate from the US is too high to buy
from unless it is via PayPal and eBay.

Geoff.

 

[Tom Biasi]

Seems to go against the whole ethos of exercising. Never get out of bed and
live forever ...

If you were an android that may be true.

 

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Problem with that is my location. Shipping anything from anywhere except
China is too expensive to make it worth while. A $10 (postage included)
Samsung feed roller is worth buying, a part that does not fit in an
envelope and has to go in a USPS box costs 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of a
cheap Samsung printer. UPS/DHL/FDEDX double or tripple that price.

Also to be honest, the loss/theft rate from the US is too high to buy
from unless it is via PayPal and eBay.

Couple of years back I needed a new element for my Pace SX80 desolder
iron. Not one to be had in the UK. Got one from Pace US direct at not a
bad price - but they charged 40 gbp for P&P by courier - wouldn't send it
by post. So the delivered price was considerably more than the delivered
price from a UK supplier. If it had been coming from Hong Kong or China,
would have been less than half the price and free postage...

There's lots of stuff I'd buy from the US if they would sort out their
postal service. I get the impression as much is stolen as delivered.

 

[George Herold]

If the effect is real, that sounds like a good candidate for a
mechanism.   Certainly you'd expect that to be important right near the
end of the bulb's life, so maybe it's important throughout.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot nethttp://electrooptical.net- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Yeah, I was thinking about this while splitting/stacking wood
tonight.
If the time to fail goes as some big power of the voltage
(temperature),
then during turn on, small diameter variations (or defects)
get amplfied.

A 'long life' 40 Watt bulb would fail almost as fast as a 100 W'er.

(Of course I've got my 'lifetime supply' of 100W bulbs, and didn't
budget any for research.)

George H.

 

[George Herold]

I'm still learning (mostly from my mistakes).

It's definitely my mistakes that have taught me the most.

(my latest f-up had to do with short ultrasonic pulses,
and 1/4 wavelength anti-reflection wave-plates...)

I've no problem with your marquee story. Sometimes folk-tales about
rocks falling from the sky are correct.
The data point I offer to Phil is that bulbs fail when you turn them
on. I see no reason why that can't be 'played backwards'. There most
be some GE, Philips, (other) report that documents turn on failure.

George H.

 

[George Herold]

Won't a thin region of a lamp filament have a higher temperature than
the rest of it all the time, not just when the lamp is turning on?

Rod.
--

Hmm, sure, maybe... I really have no idea. But I can't remember ever
seeing a bulb fail after being on for a while. (I'm sure it must
happen.) They almost always go when you turn them on, from which I
conclude that the turn on is more 'stressful'.

Say does Don Klipstein still lurk here? He may have some info on turn-
on failure.

http://donklipstein.com/

George H.