Hi,
Which things can I do with an old android phone ? Like a Xiaomi mi a3.
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Thanks for you answer !
Why LineageOS ?
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Make it a server/put LineageOS on it.
Depends on the age of the phone and if it is boot loader locked by a carrier.
I carry my old phone when I go to dangerous places so that if someone robs me, they don’t take the new one :p
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.
Install Pixel Experience, and use it to upload photos to your Google account without consuming your Google Drive data allotment.
Superb idea !
I used to use my old android phone to run an octoprint server.
Backup
I use mine as a camera in the garage when I’m working on my car so I don’t get my current phone all greasy.
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
Turn it into a pihole.
This
Most hardware isn’t very well supported but you could run Linux on it and use it as a sort of home server if you hook it up to a charger + ethernet adapter. Only trouble is the battery, you’d need to remove it and fake that out if you’d charge it continuously.
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.
I use mine as a desktop webcam with droidcam
I do the same thing. The camera on my old phone is much better than the one built into my laptop. And even though the phone’s battery is pretty much dead, that doesn’t matter since I have it hooked up and powered via usb all the time.
I am hooking up mine to a projector and using it to drive my home theater. Sound is handled by a bluetooth speaker. Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it a better experience for watching movies on TV? Absolutely.
