Round-the-clock use: battery, charging cable and heat for a camera phone

A phone as a baby monitor or pet camera is not built for continuous operation. It is meant for your trouser pocket, not for filming eight hours every night. With a few habits it still runs reliably and hardly harms the battery.

On the charging cable, but not blindly

The camera side of VintageCam is meant to run on the charging cable. The screen may be off and the camera keeps running in the background, but it still needs power for the microphone, network and analysis. Without power a typical phone lasts one night, but rarely more. If you run it on the charger, use a proper power adapter and make sure the cable is not overstretched or kinked.

Modern phones manage charging themselves, for example stopping at 80 to 100 percent. Some offer an option “Limit charge” or “Protect battery”, which you can safely switch on for a camera phone. An old battery that is already swollen does not belong on a permanent cable, though; if the case bulges, the phone is no longer suitable for this purpose.

Heat is the real enemy

Warmth harms batteries more than any charge cycle. A phone lying on a windowsill in the sun, tucked under a blanket or running in a case with no air can get hot. This applies especially to features that keep the camera running constantly, such as motion alert and sleep analysis. So stand the phone freely, with its back in the air, not in a pillow. Taking off a case often helps.

VintageCam keeps an eye on the temperature. Every minute the camera reports battery level, charging state and temperature to the server, and in the viewer you see the value next to the camera status: green up to 40 degrees, yellow up to 45, red above. If it gets too hot, you get a message “Camera phone is getting too hot”, and the camera works more sparingly by sending still images and live video less often.

Watching the battery level

In the viewer you can see at any time how full the battery is and whether the phone is charging. If the charging cable is pulled or the battery drops sharply, you notice in good time. With the Ultimate add-on, a pulled charging cable can also count as an alert. That is handy if the phone stands in the nursery, for example, and someone pulls the cable at night, by accident or on purpose.

Keeping an eye on data use

Anyone who runs the phone over mobile data should know the consumption. The viewer shows how much data has gone through the connection since the start, including the average per hour. Without live video very little is transmitted, because the camera sends an unchanged picture only every 30 seconds. On Wi-Fi the consumption does not matter anyway.

A short checklist

The phone on the power adapter, free-standing and not in sunlight. Switch off battery optimisation for the app, as described in the article Switch off battery optimisation. Switch the screen off or leave it only dimly lit. Once a week, look at temperature and battery level in the viewer. And after a restart of the phone, start the camera by hand once more.