Hi,
Which things can I do with an old android phone ? Like a Xiaomi mi a3.
Take the battery out of it. Put on lineage OS. Use it as a microserver, mine some crypto like monero. Because it’s CPU-based. You could use it as a remote for other devices. You could use it as a webcam for your house. It can do everything it used to do.
Old lithium batteries become a fire hazard, so I would recommend removing it if you can. Or at least replacing it with the new battery. Good practice at least even if you break it
Leaving an airplane mode, don’t use the cellular modem, you’re not getting any hardware driver updates. So it’s security risk. Don’t do anything too sensitive with it. But just for you around home network it’s fine
Can you run phones without batteries off of AC?
Depends on the design of the phone. Some will work just fine off of USB power. Some will try to detect a battery and then fail the boot. For the ones that are more troublesome you’ll have to Google the instructions on to make a dummy battery load. The important thing is to get the lithium ion battery out of the circuit.
Install Pixel Experience, and use it to upload photos to your Google account without consuming your Google Drive data allotment.
Superb idea !
Home Assistant, learn about it. You could turn your phone into a camera viewer, light switch, smart weather provider, detection device with Bluetooth. Etc.
I planned on using mine for making sort of futuristic terminals around my home. That said, my phones never grow old in my hands. Someone always inherits them before they are due.
I use an IP webcam app and run my old S10+ as a CCTV camera inside my garage, viewable in Home Assistant.
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You can use it for a Briar mailbox. Briar is a privacy focused messaging with no centralized server.
Instead you can use an old smartphone to act as a server to collect and distribute messages between you and your friends/family.
Turn it into a pihole.
This
I use an old Nexus 5 I have as a offline GPS device for cycling.
Remote control, Octoprint (if you 3D Print), PiHole, Wall Terminal, Webserver, …
Music player, bedside alarm clock/weather info, time lapse camera
We were all thinking it. But you, you beautiful maniac, actually said it 👏👏👏 👏
Next time you upgrade your phone you should try to do a trade in, it bumps some money off of the price and solves the issue of having an old phone laying around. Pretty sure they recycle the parts after that, so win-win.
Most will take the trade in phones, refurbish them, and resale them on a used market platform like backmarket. Anything not worth reselling I think is recycled.
When the phone (or whatever) is still usable I always prefer to sell it. You usually get more money and the usable product gets used some more instead of getting destroyed.
That’s essentially what a trade in is
I meant selled it on craigslist or something.
