@cristipurdel
4. I am running six alcatel one touch phones, they were only a few dollars US each. I started seeing battery bloat on the three that are older, and they were only doing about a days worth of work per calendar day (with all 4 cores active).

On one phone, I removed the battery and cut the tip off a USB cable. stripped off the red and black (green and white were not needed for my case), and soldered the tips to the positive and negative terminals on the phone. I used some electrical tape to help secure the cable to the outside of the phone, so it wouldn't bend or break the soldering points if the cable gets snagged on anything. The first phone powered up and started crunching, so I did it to the other 5.

They have been running this way for a couple months I would guess, with no ill effects. They do get quite warm, even without a battery, so I put them standing up, and put a small case fan in front of them to blow air between the phones. Keeps them a bit cooler, and now all the phones are producing around 4 days of work, give or take depending on when they report their tasks.

Edit to add: YMMV, and do at your own risk. I have read that some phones will work the way I did, and others refuse to boot at all. Also I have read that the constant 5V may fry the phones, but so far so good for me.

Depends on the phone.
My experience is with LANDVO L700, 8 core cheapos which I bought from ebay, and they crunch over a year with usb +/- wires connected to battery circuit (the battery got bloated after 2 months), and they are crunching over a year with no issues

The other Allview are running for about 6 months with the big rig from instructable



If you know smth that we do not know, please post in on instructables :)
I remember seing it somewhere, but I wanted to have a more general solution, please share the experience if you also use it
I would prefer with a small buck converter, so that when 10/12/16 core phones are available, you could resell it pretty quick.

Any casualties so far?
How long they have been running?

Wow nice. You have quite a few of those HDMI tv sticks. For the phones, does the hot glue stay cool enough to stay solid? I thought about hot glue, but ended up using electrical tape on the outside parts of the phone near the rear camera where its cooler.

I must have missed the question you asked on 25 Feb. I was a little worried about long term damage to the phones using direct 5V from the USB cables, but so far, all six of them have been running several months with no signs of ill effect. Either the hardware is very robust, or the 5V is within the normal tolerances. Again, I may have gotten extremely lucky to not have a casualty, so if you have ability to downgrade to ~3.5V to stay on the safe side, probably best to do so. I may order a power supply similar to yours, but unless I see any damage on any of the phones, I'll just continue to use my regular USB charging station

I ordered two more, and will fill up my 8 bay station with these. I have two older dual core android phones that I may retire, or just move off the bays since these will run hotter and need to stand up and be cooled by the 120mm fan that is blowing between them.

Finally managed to solve:

-how to disable thermal throttling for mediatek devices, which are basically some of the cheapest androids out there
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=76078222&postcount=15
-how to rotate the devices to be online just for 1 minute every 46 minutes, in order not to use a secondary router
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/automate-user/smKLCXqCHy8/4FBkUWo7BgAJ

things still needed to figure out:

-remote notification when device is offline for more than 8 hours - high
If someone is interested in doing some automate programing, please post comments here
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/automate-user/wZLr7GWFdd8
-restart device when last cpu freq is lower than a certain value, needs root - low
-amlogic thermal throttling universal method - low
-auto restart after power-outage - medium