Building the ULTIMATE DIY gaming phone

That's a DIY Perks level build. Awesome job

To me I think if you made the sled out of aluminum and merge it with the heatsink you can reduce the weight, improve durability, and improve heat transfer. This change would go really well if you manage to overclock it.

Geekerwan laughing in the corner

The SoC is on the other side of the motherboard. It touches the frame, screen and probably a heatsink to exhaust heat. You've added thermal mass but not in the most optimal place.

The handheld looks great! I think the wood does add in a nice bit of design to it. Although I guess you could always just glue on a wood veneer to get the same look.

you can use universal android debloater to remove all google and meta services, and boost battery life for 20-40% (this does not need rooted phone, just enable usb debuging and thats it)

Cool build but if we speak about value wise and performance Geekerwan's $150 DIY build is criminally underrated

This kinda content made me started to “hangout” in youtube 14 years ago. amazing work!! You just got yourself a +1 subs

I love your channel bro. As a man that is constantly tinkering i really appreciate how clean you keep the projects as well as the work area

You should recalibrate the battery because the phone can't really recognize that it has a bigger battery and it will have some charging problems, you can just set the capacity manually if the phone is rooted but since you can't root it, it's worth trying to recalibrate it...just for the sake of it 🙂

Hey there. The first issue I wanted to note is the use of the copper in the heatsink replacement. Without a heat pipe, You're looking at the quick thermal saturation of any interface or its materials without a meaningful transfer of energy to the actual heatsink added to the copper. This is because based on Thermal Conductivity alone Copper does a good job of absorbing heat, but it doesn't do a great job of transferring it. Copper sits around 400W/Mk of thermal conductivity, while a heat pipe can be in excess of 5000-100,000W/Mk. This means that the heatsink would be slow to heat and hard to cool effectively. If you were to place a heat pipe across the length of the heatsink, it would work much better, to the point where you would near instantly see a difference in temperature from the SOC to the end of your heatsink. Secondly, The issue with the Double battery is apparent almost instantly- due to the fact that you double capacity, you double charging times quite readily, and without the BMS to consider the second battery's health, It will assume that one battery provides the charge for both. Since the BMS only controls voltage and wear leveling, and doesn't have a way to monitor each cell individually, you can very quickly end up with a situation where you see your battery jumping around levels depending on which battery's voltage reads the highest- since they are separate cells, there is the very real possibility of the internal resistance of one cell not matching the other, causing step voltage matching. This means that the batteries face the very real possibility of mis-matched wearing and eventually diminished capacity and failure of one or more of the batteries. Usually this is corrected in BMS monitoring of multi-celled devices through what amounts to a circuit that separates the cells from one another, but ties the output together allowing them to charge individually. The K5 Pro works but currently you have an issue with the setup of the heatsink- right now it goes (assuming the Mfrs used a thermal pad) SOC>Thermal pad>Graphite pad>Aluminum>K5 Pro>Copper>Solder>Copper>Solder>Copper>Solder>Copper>Solder>M.2 Heatsink. All those layers cause a loss in heat transfer, reducing the effective area of the copper and essentially pocketing areas of the copper that didn't fully get brazed (if you ever shear the heatsink apart, consider looking at the shims and you'll see pockets where the solder didn't reach fully, it's simply because of the change of Flux to a gaseous state causing solder to have voids." Ideally, the removal of the aluminum and thermal pads would mitigate this entirely, if in addition you swapped to a heat-pipe design. In this case you'd see SOC>TIM/K5>Copper>Solder>Heat pipe>Solder>Heatsink. Also, you technically don't even need the first layer of copper attached to the heat pipe, and could attach it directly to the SOC by flattening it on one side, making sure not to crush the actual pipe. This would also decrease the weight of the build. A final consideration is the fact that there is an opportunity here to fab the entire outside case out of a block of copper, that you would then attach to the heat-pipe through soldering, and get passive cooling without an open area for the M.2 heatsink. At their max, these SOCs use about 10-13W of heat, meaning it can be easily dissipated passively in this regard. All in All it is a novel idea and i appreciate the video- just some thoughts on what I would consider. (I was someone who built their own laptop heatsinks in the 2016-2020 years, particularly for Clevos)

did you edit the system to read the new bathery data?

7:36 I experienced this first hand few weeks ago. I was doing some messing with my old torch battery, I thought it was such a small and old battery that nothing would happen, but all of a sudden it caught fire. Thank gosh it evaporated right away and I didn't die.

A little tip for anybody wanting to double up a battery in a project or something. As long as you put hot to hot and negative to negative when you're only wanting to increase the amount of battery life you want. You should be fine. Just make sure that you keep everything well isolated and do your best to try not to bridge any connections to ground

bro the stuff ive seen from you so far are on another level, i wish i had the patience to learn it myself, someday ill surely do some of these and you'll be a gold mine for me

This is fantastic work and craftsmanship, a big well done to that man!!. I would love a piece of your work!!.

that phone has a desktop mode when connected through hdmi, you missed an opportunity to make it dockable. Maybe in the next revision

something about gluing a kishi to a phone feels wrong but dam, the end result speaks for itself, having it feeling like one solid unit at the end is gold, and yeah when you went from 3D printed prototypes to wood it made me tilt my head but it does look really nice. top-notch video!

13:57 Just a tip for playing with the sealant (and anything you can fit into a caulk gun tbh): you can buy, or in your case print, extra tips to fit most tubes, and you can cut them to specific angles. In the case of your sled, you can cut both sides to make a 45° angle, and with even pressue it will perfectly smudge the silicone so that you dont have to smear it with your fingers!

Two little advice that I think I can provide: I personally don't think that using copper as a heat conductor from the Soc to the fins is not very effective, even though copper is some of the most thermally conductive metal on earth. However, there is this thing called heat pipe, which is more effective than copper at conducting heat, especially at longer distances. Samsung used vapor chambers (basically a flattened out heat pipe) to cool some of their phones' Soc. Maybe you can use a heat pipe or two to get the heat of the Soc into the fins faster. I think the Soc of modern phones typically face towards the screen, so in this project you are likely to be cooling the back of the Soc through a metal shield, and there is a possibility that there is an air gap under this shield. It might not be too big of a concern, but for an "ultimate DIY gaming phone", it would be interesting to see whether desoldering that shield, adding a blob of thermal paste, and soldering the shield back on will help with heat dissipation. Other than that, great work, and thanks to you I now know an easy way to get cheap phones😆