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
Thanks for you answer !
Why LineageOS ?
large hardware support portfolio, i think its the single most widely compatible ROM. As long as one crazy maintainer hangs on to your device, you will get lineage updates.
Just because you forgo hardware driver security updates, doesn’t mean you should stop getting android security updates.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Music player, bedside alarm clock/weather info, time lapse camera
I used to use my old android phone to run an octoprint server.
Install Pixel Experience, and use it to upload photos to your Google account without consuming your Google Drive data allotment.
Superb idea !
I use an old Nexus 5 I have as a offline GPS device for cycling.
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).
Baby monitor or dash cam.
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.
Turn it into a pihole.
This
Home Assistant, learn about it. You could turn your phone into a camera viewer, light switch, smart weather provider, detection device with Bluetooth. Etc.
