Comment on Zero Chull
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 months agoThe phones are all wired, so I could imagine they receive LAN via USB-C. That would make the whole setup not that difficult.
On the other side, these phones don’t need to be all active at the same time. I could imagine that they just switch on the Wifi while interacting with one of the phones.
The lan thing makes sense, I could see that. Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true.
As for turning WiFi on and off, that could work too, didn’t think of that. But I feel like maybe not? Surely the apps would complain or get suspicious of only connecting to make a quick comment and then disconnecting again, every single time. Or maybe not.
I just imagine companies trying to fight this somehow, and that would be a suspicious fingerprint.
Check out this post, btw: lemmy.world/post/39372777
There you can see the USB to LAN adapters dangling off the bottom row of phones.
The lan thing makes sense, I could see that. Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true. Plus those adapters are cheap but not dirt cheap, right?
You don’t actually need to adapt out of it. There are Ethernet-over-USB switches that output to USB directly. So all you need are USB cables, and you need them anyway to provide power. So all you are doing (compared to just power over USB) is to use an Ethernet-over-USB switch instead of an USB PSU.
Here’s the first one I found on google: www.digi.com/products/networking/…/anywhereusb
The one they advertise on that website has 24 USB outputs, but I’m sure you can find bigger ones. And from them you only need a single patch cable to the next proper switch.
There’s about 100 phones on the panel and another 100 on the other side, so that would be maybe 8 or 9 of these switches, all wired together into a 10 port switch and that one then is fed by a single input line.
The upside for a setup like this is that the bandwidth requirements per device are minuscule. It’s a lot of devices, but they aren’t doing anything for most of the time. That’s quite the opposite of what we usually plan for when designing a regular network where if we have hundreds of devices we expect them to actually do something as well.
This is USB over IP, not IP over USB.
The product you linked is for USB devices to be able I be used over a network. One common use-case is getting hardware license tokens (on a USB dongle) accessible to a virtual machine…especially when that VM can move dynamically between hosting servers for load-balancing or fail-over.
The closest I’ve seen is a cart intended for tablets or Chromebooks that gives 60W PD + Ethernet over one USB-C port. So something similar exists. I think with this though, you had to bring your own Ethernet switch.
I would love to see something like that, but with active cooling and 180-240W PD.
Then take this one: m.made-in-china.com/…/USB-to-Ethernet-8-Ports-Swi…
But even if you can’t find an off-the-shelf solution for this, it’s trivial to DIY one. One USB controller can feed 127 devices maximum. You’ll obviously need powered USB hubs for that, but that’s not an issue. This works because when you enable USB tethering, the phone can be in USB device mode while getting IP over USB. The main issue here is the routes, but if you use an app that creates a local VPN on the phone to capture the traffic you can then tunnel that traffic through the tethering connection, using it in the reverse direction. Now you only need a PC with many USB controllers (easily done using PCI-E extension cards) and you are done.
Setup is a little complicated, but you only need to configure it once and then copy it over to all the phones.
I would love to see something like that, but with active cooling and 180-240W PD. And probably dual L6-30s, if not more, to power the damn thing.
I haven’t seen any devices so far that can deliver high wattage on multiple ports at the same time, so I think the PD is probably the bigger limit.
Wow that’s crazy!
Plus those adapters are cheap but not dirt cheap, right?
for usb-c? $10 each, nonbulk, on aliexpress is what I see, a worthwhile investment for a farm like this
Especially considering the price of the phones they are running. Even if they are trashed second-hand ones they will be much more expensive than the adapters.
Bgugi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I can pretty confidently say that usn-c wasn’t used in this photo - posts from around 10 years ago indicate that these are iPhone 5c’s.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Doesn’t matter in the slightest. Ethernet over USB works irrespective of the shape of the plug.