I have a couple Android phones with little resell value and I’m wondering what I could do with them on my spare time.
Not sure if this is the right sub to ask but figured it could be a good start to see if anyone here has done anything with phones.
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You can glue them together for double phones.
Glue the edges together and make your own Surface Duo.
Ive seen people building whole houses from empty bottles. He could do the same with those phones. He would end up with true “smarthome”
You can use it as a security camera on the cheap.
SyncThing backup storage.
Leave one in the car, for emergencies
If you do this, keep a cable and charger handy. An old unused phone battery will drain.
If its not crazy old you could get a super cheap nvmo service and toss it in your car/emergency bag with a spare battery pack and cable
I don’t know if it’s still viable but few years back I used to use my old Android phone/phablet as extra monitor for my pc to monitor stats with Spacedesk. It runs on wifi and gives you the ability to add multi devices as monitors so potentially you can make all your old phones into many monitors for your pc as long as they are all on the same network.
Wifi based walkie talkies for the kids? hehe
Currently using 4 android phones I got from friends/families “junk drawer” to use as a home security system.
Won’t that be easily exploited when exposed to the Internet, considering the OS has not been updated for years?
No need to expose to the Internet. You can e.g. expose them to Home-Assistant/openHAB only, or VPN to your LAN then connect to them.
That sounds really interesting. Can you share how you set this up and what software you used?
It’s just an app from the play store. I’ve looked into self-hosted open source things but didn’t find much. The app I use is called “Alfred”. It has the basic features. Motion sensor People sensor Saves the motion clips to the cloud Continuous playback Two-way talk Auto-low light Etc…
You you keep the phones permanently plugged in or charge them periodically?
Plugged in all time,screen off, battery saver on 😊
Home assistant + fully kiosk browser
(Or root + termux + docker)
r/androidafterlife is a good place to look
I used mine to monitor stats on my gaming PC with an app called Remote Systems Monitor. I think you have to pay a one time fee to unlock everything, but it was well worth it imo. The application on your PC sends the data to the app over your network locally.
I paired it with Automate app, so when my PC turned off the power to USB got cut, the phone would lock and dim the brightness down to 0 - just so I’m not frying the battery. Then it would do the opposite when I turned my PC back on, was a pretty fun little project to do.
bit of retro gaming? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjZ84HjN2g
Set it up as a smart display with a dashboard of some sort and hang it up somewhere?
A wifi web cam is something i’ve been using an old Nexus phone I still have. The picture is pretty good and I like that I can out it anywhere there is wifi.
You could create an IP Webcam that could be used with a program like Frigate (I think that’s what it called).