Hi,
Which things can I do with an old android phone ? Like a Xiaomi mi a3.
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I do same. Don’t got any accounts logged in either on it and just runs f-droid apps and Aurora store. It’s reason I value physical Sims since it makes it easy to swap when I need to without having to sign in to anything, since it’s my accountless phone that if I lost has nothing of importance in it.
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 !
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I use an IP webcam app and run my old S10+ as a CCTV camera inside my garage, viewable in Home Assistant.
Battery powered? Screen on/off?
The app lets the screen turn off. I have it plugged in to a smart power switch, and have the HA Android app installed.
This way, I can monitor the phone’s battery level with HA and use automation to keep the battery charged between 40% and 80%.
Nice, I will check that app. In the past I used to separate apps for that and screen off didn’t work well, it would wake even if nothing happened.
Honestly, the screen being on doesn’t really worry me too much now, and I suspect an Android change in the past few releases has made it less reliable when the app tries to do it, because I’ll occasionally walk by and see that it’s on.
I’ve set the brightness all the way down and it sits up at ceiling height, on top of a wall-mounted network cabinet. I remote control it from my computer, using scrcpy (requires adb over TCP/IP).
Home Assistant, learn about it. You could turn your phone into a camera viewer, light switch, smart weather provider, detection device with Bluetooth. Etc.
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.
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
Turn it into a pihole.
This
I use an old Nexus 5 I have as a offline GPS device for cycling.
Music player, bedside alarm clock/weather info, time lapse camera
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Remote control, Octoprint (if you 3D Print), PiHole, Wall Terminal, Webserver, …
We were all thinking it. But you, you beautiful maniac, actually said it 👏👏👏 👏
Old phone? I’m still running a Mi A1 as my daily. I’m on LineageOS 19.1. There have been rumblings of Lineage 20 coming to it, but the Dev community has largely dropped off.
I’d check if there are any local high-schools or support services that are looking to get phones intot he hands of underprivileged teens/adults. A Mi A3 is likely still better than the low end Samsung garbage, or even an old iPhone (below X).
Better to have it be reused than become a paperweight in a cupboard.
