I've been using mobile phones for years as web servers, wifi routers, for running computations, downloading torrents. The funny thing is the raspberry pi costs like 50+$ and has nothing more but a 4x1.5GHz CPU, max 4GB of ram and wifi+bt. For that price you can actually buy a slightly damaged s8-10 phone that bas a huge battery, 4G modem, 8 core CPU, 4-8GB RAM, lots of drive space and many more. It also uses a lot less power on standby.
@@loopingdope you just install Termux and inside it you install the regular server stuff like SSH, nginx etc. The only actual limitation is that if the phone is not rooted, you have to use port numbers higher than 1024
Me too , i personally used droidian to convert the phone into a linux based server and settled it up with tailscale so that I can ssh into it securely and make it do whatever I want
@@loopingdope I think you could just figure it out how to run Linux or something. Otherwise I would look at some sort of terminal applications or a virtual machine.
Smartphones have: accelerometer, gyroscope, which can be used as a horizon level or motion sensor, thermometer, camera, microphone, compass, gps, light sensor, fingerprint scanner, retina scanner (in Samsung), NFC reader, fm radio in some models, Internet access (online radio, weather forecast, transfer of files to the server, for example, video from a surveillance camera, etc), barometer, SD-card, SIM-card and other features.
Yeah. But not every function is available for diy. Fingerprint scanner and "retina" scanner. They are locked. I have no clue what phone that has retina scanner. Not even iPhone.
@@LordGryllwotth it could be possible to use the face id sensor on the iphone! it's a great 3d scanner and there are external apps that use it to create 3d models
@@LordGryllwotth thats easy dude! I use OpenCV for that! As long as you know programming! You can use any hardware on the phone! Vibrator, camera, gyro, accelerometer....
Probably my old phone is faster than a raspberry. And it is impossible to find a 4G/5G sim module for microcontrollers but we can use our old mobile phones. This is awesome.
Caveat is that sometimes phones behave strangely when you supply constant voltage to the battery pins, since they seem to expect voltage to go higher or lower over time as the battery exhausts itself. I think I've seen that some models of phone will strangely report the "battery's charge" declines until it hits 0 and then shut down. Depends on the model of phone; sometimes it might expect there to be a thermistor there, or BSI, or who knows what. Sometimes you might have to try and harvest an old battery's charge/control board and solder your power input to that as an intermediary, so that the phone at least thinks a proper battery is indeed inserted.
My Galaxy S4 was one of my favourite phones ever precisely because it was so easy to disassemble. I woke up one morning to discover I'd tipped a glass of water over it in the night and fried and USB port. Five minutes on eBay to source a replacement (whose postage was more expensive than the board) and I was back up and running twenty minutes after it arrived. Strongly suspect that my next phone will be one that promotes this sort of sustainability over being 3% lighter or whatever.
nokia phones are doing good repairability wise even xiaomi phones too tbh and you also could flash gsi/custom roms on both of them for basically 10+ years of software updates
My S4 has been in the washing machine. Twice. It still works, it is running a boroscope, hardware plus app, in my motorcycle workshop. One of my favorite phones ever.
You can attach a simple arduino board the same way and communicate it through serial connection. It will expand wastly the IO ports and you can use the phones camera and muscle to do harder stuffs. Also there is firmata. A library to arduino which allows you to "remotely" (using serial comms) configure and control the pins. With it you don't need to write separate code to the arduino each time you modify something in your code in the phone regardles if you want to use more ports.
Exactly. I tried this to make an Remote Controlled RC car, but instead of buying the modules for the connectivity, camera, etc. I just simply hooked up an old Android that has a mobile data connectivity then create an android app that connects to a remote server that can communicate with the arduino serial. Works flawlessly until I accidentally crashed the RC car into a parked car which caused the charging port to broke off lmao.
I had a similar idea and created a ground drone with an old phone. The fun part is that you can turn on the mobile data and control it from another continent.
I did a similar project were i used the display of the phone and some photoresistors to control a rc car. Right now i have 10 old smartphones lying around waiting to be used.
@@Normy0000 connect multiple old phones and run a cluster compute , though you need a laptop or PC and actual problems to handle useless if you are norme, though you can make a farm and advertise for game afk farming XD
@@moetocafeNot just vender locked though, there are a number of things Android itself locks you out of doing without root, it'd be like Windows not giving users administrator access, the only reason we have sideloading is because Google allows it.
Damn, so glad I found this video. Been really getting into micro.controllers recently, but had no idea phones could be so useful for projects... I have four phones sitting in a box, waiting until I could find a use for them.. So many interesting comments from viewers too
Android is in full control of the hardware, meaning it will force your application to stop at random weird moments, that's why it can't be used for anyting reliable. Imagine you have built a drone using old android phone, you have evrything, hd camera, gps, lte, gyro, lot of ram, space and cpu power, just that your drone might just stop responding because android will just kill the app that controls it. That's the problem.
Nice! Make a turret to mount on and then also controls for water and food dispensing so can have an audio video interface with camera control to call your pet when food and water is dispensed as well as lower their anxiety when one is away for a few days at a time. Awesome work! Such a waste the old phones are and such great device capabilities like even as a webcam alone.
You have to buy a lot of components for the pi that come built into a phone. Battery, touchscreen, accelerometer etc. Also it gives a use for old phones that struggle to have a purpose otherwise. I think it's great
this is because android phones and rasp PI's share a common foundation called linux kernel. The android OS is a modified linux kernel, while the rasp pi OS is also a modified Debian distro.
@@SalimShahdiOff Yes, but only for PC software. Anything web application related has been built on fixed versions of open source components that cannot be updated, have hundreds of dependencies on other fixed versions of open source components and some of then cannot even be installed in parallel to other versions of said components. When you are maintaining or extending software that has been written a couple of years ago chances are you need a separate virtual machine for the development tools, have to dig up components out of dubious archive websites because the used versions are out of support, no more officially available and the documentation has been taken off the web long time ago.
You can use the USB for charging the phone and a Bluetooth module on a microcontroller to transmit and receive RS232 type serial communication. I did that once so I could switch the solar power to my floodlight remotely from my website when I was living on a small island.
Your idea is great. I want to share my idea with you. We all know that bluetooth headphones have a very small receiver. It is convenient for all sorts of crafts, robots, and toys. It has a battery and a charge controller on board. If we make an application that will encode commands into sound of a certain frequency and transmit via bluetooth, and on the receiver side we put an arduino that receives the sound and decodes it into commands, then we can make a universal platform for controlling toys and gadgets. We get rid of problems with switching android - arduino. And the sketch for arduino will be a few lines. How do you like the idea?
Yeah, nice idea if you have an old BT speaker or headphones you can take it from. But I think you need to run some FFT analysis on the Arduino to distinguish the frequencies. And that might slow down the actual application. I would rather use a HC-05 Bluetooth module or an ESP32 with Bluetooth. And a power bank would make a good battery with charge controller.
I like it, but I don't have time right now. Also, it's possible to use cheap universal BT receivers and program the BT device on the Arduino accordingly. ESP32 would also work over Wi-fi, besides BT.
There's no need to encode/decode sound streaming, it's much simpler than that. Just use an HC-05 or HC-06 module, there are dozens of similar projects on UA-cam.
1. Is safe to connect 5v to the battery terminal, I've tried on lots of device 2. You can use a esp32 or stm or whatever as uart to gpio adapter (Or use the phone as uart HMI touch screen)
I've been using an old Samsung S8 and two S10s for a portable baby monitor and two media centers for years now. The media center capability of Samsung DeX is amazing - you just slap a HDMI hub to the phone, connect it to a TV or an unused monitor and you have the most advanced android smart TV you can imagine, for next to zero money. You can also connect a keyboard and a mouse to it, and with a bluetooth app - operate it remotely with another phone.
Okay. Open questions: - What about soldering to some pads to turn the phone on and off? - What if the phone doesn't want constant voltage? Seems to be especially a problem when booting up but I also heard about devices where the percentage still decreases over time... I think the temperature contact(s) should somehow be taken care off... - What happens if somebody puts in a charger at the USB port while the phone is powered by constant voltage instead of by a battery? Will that just be fine?
Ideally I would like to have a solution that allows to either connect some random battery (of the same type ofc to keep it simple...) or a power supply thus that a phone that stays at one place for the majority of time could also be taken with to somewhere if necessary.
There should be a standardized/popularized app & PCB to do this with old Android and possibly Apple devices, so DIYers don't have to do all of this themselves.
@@chasewatkins3096 @lshxggyl There are many different ports, phones, and reasons that people will want to use a RasPi. And if you're just using it as a server, none of this is needed.
Можно убрать Android и написать свой простой графический интерфейс для ядра Linux. Про этот процесс писал в своём текстовом блоге Monobogdan. Ещё он использовал порты GPIO на материнской плате смартфона, чтобы подключить стик геймпада и внешний модем GSM
intresting. i would use this to implement something like i2c protocoll to get a few more i/O ports. also there are a lot of i2c sensors out there. also the cameras, gyro and a lot of other stuff can be used in the app... im not sure what projekts i will do but i will try this.
Would love to see more videos like this. I have a semi dead S9+ I'm using as a webcam and a few other phones lying around. Would love to use them for something useful :)
Comparing a used android phone to a raspberry pi is like comparing a used kenworth semi truck with a trailer to a brand new base model f150 that doesnt even come with a bed on its frame. The fact that a used phone even has a battery and a decent screen makes it way better depending on what project your doing.
I saw a samsung galaxy s5 from 2014 fall from the sky the otherday and into a park thankfully was closed off for construction. I think someone dropped it from the condo above. I climbed the fense to get into the park and found a samsung s5 in the dirt, unfortunately not battery, the Gods must be crazy!
Even the older phones wont charge nor work with a simple plus and minus supply on its battery connector! You have to put a resistor between the battery sensor pin. Out of my mind I think its a 2.4k resistor or something around that. I have very old phones and none will work by simply connectingn plus and minus to the battery pins.
The resistor you mentioned is actually a thermal resistor that prevents the battery from being charged when it is too hot or too cold. But as in my case I don't want to charge the phone, it also works without it.
@@DoctorVolt As I said. Many phones wont even take the power from the plus and minus without the response of the battery. So all phones that I have wont even work without the resistor.
@@DoctorVolt Actually for me it worked on a Samsung S3, J5 and Huawei P8 lite with the power wires soldered to the battery BMS (I removed the battery cell because it was dead and the phone had many other problems anyway).
Guess you could use any phone to program a microcontroller arduino or such..but I thought raspberry pi has a microcontroller chip you can buy also. The phone got a nice display interface though.
I'm not sure why, so bear with me, but I clearly see someone watching this video 10 years from now, from a hard drive labeled 'very useful - don't waste' in a bunker while hiding from the UN. Thanks for posting something very useful and not to be wasted (I'm going to download this one and put it on the HD, even though I've only used a soldering iron twice in my life).
Everything is okay until he solders the battery and directly connects with the branch power supply, he can do the same with esp32 and send data using wifi or with bluetooth, and doesn't even need any soldering or opening the phone.
That's Arduino level, not Pi. You can control electeonics with it, but you can't use it as a computer cause all the parts are heavily integrated (unlike RPi).
I'm wanting to make a device similar to the Solid Eye from MGS4, and I was planning to use a Raspberry Pi, but since I already have a old moto e5 with all components, might as well use it. I'm pretty new to this type of science tho
Some phones need a 10k resistor connected between ground and the middle pin to fool the battery temperature sensing or else the phone won't start up. Also, some phones need a constantly connected USB charger as well, otherwise the non-existing battery can "discharge" over time, because the percentage gets calculated by the phone's dumb software. So, if the phone starts becoming warm with a connected charger, simply connect the "battery" positive trough a diode instead. If this is not enough, connect a 16V 1000µF & 10V 2200µF capacitor between the "battery" positive and negative for some additional capacity. ⚡ I made my old "Lenovo A2010" running from a 4.5V mains adaptor this way, because I only used it in my room and I didn't wanted to make the aftermarket battery into a pillow over time. It's stable, it successfully shows the clock since months, but it can't work in case of a power outage. 📱
It's not so linear to use phones for appliances, I once developed a product that I worked on where we end up giving up of using a tablet and start using a LCD with microcontroller because of instability particularities and bugs in the android system and that could not happen by any means on our products.
I think it's a really cool idea. Couldn't have come up with it myself but. First you go "Dissecting a mobile phone" and then you go "With an OTG adapter cable we can easily connect it" So, why did you disassemble the phone?
We could use this as a fast iot board, something as simple as hosting apps via ssh ing into the phone and deploying docker there So much more is possible but I wanna try using an old phone as a server They have 4-8 cores, 1-4 gig rams, a very efficient arm processor, builtin wifi and ble
It's a very nice ideia! But the problem is that the phone like a general purpose computer,. It's not a dedicated device. For example if the power runs out, the Android will restart and you will be in the home screen.... not in the app that control the USB.
@@DoctorVolt yes , but type c phone you can charge it and powers the attached device. OTG with two usb connectors, one for input ( charging) the other one for the device
with rs485 modbus i/o device you can read digital and analog ios via modbus read coil write contact and read / write holding register commands. you will need usb tu rs485 converter for about 5 usd
Hey, is there a way to turn your old phone into a smart speaker??? I want to know how to do this since the phone has all the hardware needed to make one.
I like the idea of having a custom board that replaces the battery and have the wires out for connecting to power source. are there ready-made ones that can adjust the voltage to the acceptable range for the phone?
Instead of using the transistor Open Collector on the USB to RS232 board to short out the LED (which wastes energy), why not just use it to provide the Ground (-) to the LED?
Hi, can we use our charging adapter wires to connect directly to the battery terminals. I think if we can do that it could be an efficient way to turn our phone into a wireless camera that can be accessed over the local wifi network.
I have an Amazon Firestick that is going out. It's still usable, but it is getting slower & slower. I've been wanting to replace it, but after watching this video I think that it's possible to have an android phone (that's cheap because it has a cracked screen) to run the Prime Video app and then Play store apps on my TV. Then I would want a device to replace the Firestick remote; maybe with a Bluetooth mini keyboard & trackpad. The advantage of an android phone is that it can be much more powerful than a Firestick and even many smart TVs. Then that allows for mobile gaming on my living room TV. It also makes me wonder if smart phones could run Batocera (retro gaming focused Linux distro). Hmm... You are free to use this idea for a video.
Nice project. The use of a FTDI USB adapter is rather limited. But what would be really cool is to move to an Arduino Nano and implement a firmware that lets the pins / functions mapping be set from Android app and then command executed remotely. This would allow the implementation of analogRead/Write and maybe also some basic I2C functionality (like reading / writing bytes).
I was also thinking of that. But finally I decided for the solution that's more effortless to implement. (You only need to program the phone, not both phone and MCU)
I’d be happy to give you my old HTC phone so you can waste your time trying to convert the phone. I’d rather buy the raspberry pi with the necessary OS and software to get the job done. Samsung Galaxy is easier to mod as it was more popular. Also I have a bunch of old blackberry phones too. Are these worth trying to tinker with?
How to power the old phone and use the arduino board at the same time? Programming in android studio is much more complicated than python on re raspberry pi. Raspberry pi has much more connectivity options and it's not very expensive.
One BIG caveat: the old phone will run old super old software, with all the security issues. Fine for tinkering projects, not so much for anything that could be used as an attack vector into your home network (such as a non-local webserver). Also Coding for Android pre 4 is annoying imho. You can sometimes fix this with a custom ROM, but that makes this a lot more effort. Depending a lot on the phone/tablet. Another option would be to enable a guest network on your router, this will put a firewall between your unsafe devices and your online banking and what not machines. (Plenty of phones with newer android laying around though) Finally a good end: do consider using termux to get a more linux-like experience on android, with packages, scripting, python, and stuff like that.
The Pi 5 is built on a newly designed and released Broadcom CPU, which is equivalent in performance to the Heilo G99 by Mediatek, that many people use in their smartphones. While it isn’t exactly ideal to use it without an active cooler, performance wise it will still run better than its predecessor, while keep in roughly the same temperature as the pi 4.
@@Brain_pocketer 1. For some tests, 3Ghz Pi5 is slower than 2.2 Ghz Pi4B. And much slower than RK3588 2.4Ghz. 2. Pi 5 is 16nm, G99 is 6nm. Pi 5 is really HOT! BTW, the TCO of G99 is much lower than Pi 5. I love G99 very much.
I have a question. I bought ft232,but how to connect it to breadboard? You plugged something in the bottom of the chip, but what is it? Btw i don't have arduino, just electronics set.
Yeah, what about I2C, SPI, Digital IO, PWM? A SBC is considerably more versatile. Additionally, the linux kernel on android is older than the ones on these sbcs.
My issue with this example is that you could easily get a microcontroller to do the same task, costing less than the $5 someone might ask for an old phone... Tbh, I thought that you were gonna install rasbian, or work with the bare metal hardware... How do I wire up an e-ink display to a phone, without the necessary components getting more expensive than a raspi, and the interface being USB? But you're entirely right, a raspi is basically a phone platform without all the sensors and display.
@@DoctorVolt that's also correct, but you still have a huge overhead by running a fully featured android on top of it... and in return, your I/O is limited to an RS232 connection wrapped in more overhead, because it has to use the USB protocol. But you're right, you do get a lot of sensors and potentially both Bluetooth and Internet hardware and stack for free. It's just quite limited how much I/O you get. If you want to control relays for instance, you easily end up paying more for the electronic components to adapt to USB as you would pay for a RasPi or clone, that has direct I/O pins.
Idk if its possible, but with a usb c, a video capture card, an esp32, the app to read the video from the capture card it could be possible to make an ambilight
I've been using mobile phones for years as web servers, wifi routers, for running computations, downloading torrents. The funny thing is the raspberry pi costs like 50+$ and has nothing more but a 4x1.5GHz CPU, max 4GB of ram and wifi+bt. For that price you can actually buy a slightly damaged s8-10 phone that bas a huge battery, 4G modem, 8 core CPU, 4-8GB RAM, lots of drive space and many more. It also uses a lot less power on standby.
How do you make a phone into a server?
@@loopingdope you just install Termux and inside it you install the regular server stuff like SSH, nginx etc. The only actual limitation is that if the phone is not rooted, you have to use port numbers higher than 1024
@@loopingdopegood question
Me too , i personally used droidian to convert the phone into a linux based server and settled it up with tailscale so that I can ssh into it securely and make it do whatever I want
@@loopingdope I think you could just figure it out how to run Linux or something. Otherwise I would look at some sort of terminal applications or a virtual machine.
Smartphones have: accelerometer, gyroscope, which can be used as a horizon level or motion sensor, thermometer, camera, microphone, compass, gps, light sensor, fingerprint scanner, retina scanner (in Samsung), NFC reader, fm radio in some models, Internet access (online radio, weather forecast, transfer of files to the server, for example, video from a surveillance camera, etc), barometer, SD-card, SIM-card and other features.
Yeah. But not every function is available for diy. Fingerprint scanner and "retina" scanner. They are locked. I have no clue what phone that has retina scanner. Not even iPhone.
@@LordGryllwotth it could be possible to use the face id sensor on the iphone! it's a great 3d scanner and there are external apps that use it to create 3d models
Sorry, not "retina", but iris scanner. Samsung S9 has it. It seems to me that these functions can be used with a working smartphone.
@@LordGryllwotth thats easy dude! I use OpenCV for that! As long as you know programming! You can use any hardware on the phone! Vibrator, camera, gyro, accelerometer....
I miss when IR Blasters were more common...
Using perf board kind of genius actually, i never thinking of that before.Thanks for the tips.
Yeah was blown away with 🎉 that part. I work with Android devices so the rest was more fun than blowing my mind.
Lovely demonstrator project, this would be perfect for turning an old phone into a wireless security camera that could operate a pan/tilt mount 😁
Sounds like a useful application.
@@DoctorVoltKönntest Du Dich daran versuchen? Klingt spannend!
Probably my old phone is faster than a raspberry. And it is impossible to find a 4G/5G sim module for microcontrollers but we can use our old mobile phones. This is awesome.
Caveat is that sometimes phones behave strangely when you supply constant voltage to the battery pins, since they seem to expect voltage to go higher or lower over time as the battery exhausts itself. I think I've seen that some models of phone will strangely report the "battery's charge" declines until it hits 0 and then shut down. Depends on the model of phone; sometimes it might expect there to be a thermistor there, or BSI, or who knows what. Sometimes you might have to try and harvest an old battery's charge/control board and solder your power input to that as an intermediary, so that the phone at least thinks a proper battery is indeed inserted.
IThinkTheBatteryChipDestroysItselfIfIfBateryIsDisconected,FromTheChip.
@@ovidius2000why do you type like that, it's hard to read
@@ovidius2000also no lol
@@king_james_official CanYouEvenBlameHimThough?HeJussTryinaMakeANameForHimself.
My Galaxy S4 was one of my favourite phones ever precisely because it was so easy to disassemble. I woke up one morning to discover I'd tipped a glass of water over it in the night and fried and USB port. Five minutes on eBay to source a replacement (whose postage was more expensive than the board) and I was back up and running twenty minutes after it arrived. Strongly suspect that my next phone will be one that promotes this sort of sustainability over being 3% lighter or whatever.
CMF started a revolution..but only time will tell..
Get a Fairphone 5 then.
The only problem with Fairphone is that they don't use top of the line SoCs.
nokia phones are doing good repairability wise even xiaomi phones too tbh and you also could flash gsi/custom roms on both of them for basically 10+ years of software updates
My S4 has been in the washing machine. Twice. It still works, it is running a boroscope, hardware plus app, in my motorcycle workshop. One of my favorite phones ever.
get once of those CMF phones
You can attach a simple arduino board the same way and communicate it through serial connection. It will expand wastly the IO ports and you can use the phones camera and muscle to do harder stuffs.
Also there is firmata. A library to arduino which allows you to "remotely" (using serial comms) configure and control the pins. With it you don't need to write separate code to the arduino each time you modify something in your code in the phone regardles if you want to use more ports.
Exactly. I tried this to make an Remote Controlled RC car, but instead of buying the modules for the connectivity, camera, etc. I just simply hooked up an old Android that has a mobile data connectivity then create an android app that connects to a remote server that can communicate with the arduino serial. Works flawlessly until I accidentally crashed the RC car into a parked car which caused the charging port to broke off lmao.
very cool. can pls give a bit more details on that?
very cool. can pls give a bit more details on that?
This ins one of the most amazing way of using old phones! Congrads!
Now i can turn my old phone into a drone computer
Or even FPV. 😮
I thought of the same idea but I caught not do it
@@EmmanuelBanaheneAdamnor-hn8ej why so?
Latency…
I had a similar idea and created a ground drone with an old phone. The fun part is that you can turn on the mobile data and control it from another continent.
I did a similar project were i used the display of the phone and some photoresistors to control a rc car. Right now i have 10 old smartphones lying around waiting to be used.
This is the concept i have always wondered if it would be possible. Thank you Doc.
Old phones were worthless before this video
Unless you know what a phone is.
A small computer.
you can run 3D printers with old phones with octo4a...
@@Normy0000 connect multiple old phones and run a cluster compute , though you need a laptop or PC and actual problems to handle useless if you are norme, though you can make a farm and advertise for game afk farming XD
There was a neato vid of a guy made a laptop body and added a phone to make a home made Chromebook. I thought it was a good use for an old phone.
or you could sell it back to scraps collector. it is worth more if the condition is good. nice change of money
People don't usually recognize that phones are fully fledged computers.
Plenty do, not many work out what can be done.
we do, but those are vendor-locked devices, hard to put into versatile use
not everyone is a nerd bro
@@moetocafeNot just vender locked though, there are a number of things Android itself locks you out of doing without root, it'd be like Windows not giving users administrator access, the only reason we have sideloading is because Google allows it.
@@vgamesx1 you are right. I think the area, where we miss FOSS the most is exactly the smartphones.
Damn, so glad I found this video.
Been really getting into micro.controllers recently, but had no idea phones could be so useful for projects... I have four phones sitting in a box, waiting until I could find a use for them..
So many interesting comments from viewers too
Great idea for old phones lying around.
I have the same idea but you made the video first, good job, I've actually did this in production several times and it worked very well
Why not posting the link to your video when you have done it, may be with a different application?
Android is in full control of the hardware, meaning it will force your application to stop at random weird moments, that's why it can't be used for anyting reliable. Imagine you have built a drone using old android phone, you have evrything, hd camera, gps, lte, gyro, lot of ram, space and cpu power, just that your drone might just stop responding because android will just kill the app that controls it. That's the problem.
Nice! Make a turret to mount on and then also controls for water and food dispensing so can have an audio video interface with camera control to call your pet when food and water is dispensed as well as lower their anxiety when one is away for a few days at a time. Awesome work! Such a waste the old phones are and such great device capabilities like even as a webcam alone.
Raspberry pi: ready to go IMMEDIATELY.
This: ready to go after a few days of frustration and convolution.
You have to buy a lot of components for the pi that come built into a phone. Battery, touchscreen, accelerometer etc. Also it gives a use for old phones that struggle to have a purpose otherwise. I think it's great
Raspberry pi = expensive
This = free
Do not assume everyone has money for their projects
so funny raspberry pi supposed to be cheap 😂
this is because android phones and rasp PI's share a common foundation called linux kernel. The android OS is a modified linux kernel, while the rasp pi OS is also a modified Debian distro.
You mean Rasbian I suppose. The Raspberry Pi itself isn't an OS.
@@NorthernChimp yes yes forgive my bad english😅 I was referring to the OS used by rasp pi which is Rasbian, a modified debian distro for pi.
Crazy to see that Android Studio still supports Android 3. This is unthinkable in the Microsoft world.
@@MetalheadAndNerd wayy too useful lol!
I think i'mma start learnin android software developin.
I don't want to be a Microsoft defender, but their backward compability is generally reallly good
@@SalimShahdiOff Yes, but only for PC software. Anything web application related has been built on fixed versions of open source components that cannot be updated, have hundreds of dependencies on other fixed versions of open source components and some of then cannot even be installed in parallel to other versions of said components.
When you are maintaining or extending software that has been written a couple of years ago chances are you need a separate virtual machine for the development tools, have to dig up components out of dubious archive websites because the used versions are out of support, no more officially available and the documentation has been taken off the web long time ago.
@@MetalheadAndNerd oh I didn't know about the web app hell you're describing to be honest
but the phone in the video is not android 4.X ish holo?
I love the idea! I think I need to buy an FT232 breakout board.
Thank you for this video, you gave me an idea what to use for my old Android 6 mobile phones.
Watching from Manila PHILIPPINES
Mabuhay!
What ideas if u may share?
You can use the USB for charging the phone and a Bluetooth module on a microcontroller to transmit and receive RS232 type serial communication. I did that once so I could switch the solar power to my floodlight remotely from my website when I was living on a small island.
sounds like a wild story
Who needs opening tools when you have calcium.
Strong nails as a tool, definitely been there!
Your idea is great. I want to share my idea with you. We all know that bluetooth headphones have a very small receiver. It is convenient for all sorts of crafts, robots, and toys. It has a battery and a charge controller on board. If we make an application that will encode commands into sound of a certain frequency and transmit via bluetooth, and on the receiver side we put an arduino that receives the sound and decodes it into commands, then we can make a universal platform for controlling toys and gadgets. We get rid of problems with switching android - arduino. And the sketch for arduino will be a few lines. How do you like the idea?
Yeah, nice idea if you have an old BT speaker or headphones you can take it from. But I think you need to run some FFT analysis on the Arduino to distinguish the frequencies. And that might slow down the actual application. I would rather use a HC-05 Bluetooth module or an ESP32 with Bluetooth. And a power bank would make a good battery with charge controller.
I like it, but I don't have time right now. Also, it's possible to use cheap universal BT receivers and program the BT device on the Arduino accordingly. ESP32 would also work over Wi-fi, besides BT.
There's no need to encode/decode sound streaming, it's much simpler than that. Just use an HC-05 or HC-06 module, there are dozens of similar projects on UA-cam.
1. Is safe to connect 5v to the battery terminal, I've tried on lots of device
2. You can use a esp32 or stm or whatever as uart to gpio adapter
(Or use the phone as uart HMI touch screen)
I've been using an old Samsung S8 and two S10s for a portable baby monitor and two media centers for years now. The media center capability of Samsung DeX is amazing - you just slap a HDMI hub to the phone, connect it to a TV or an unused monitor and you have the most advanced android smart TV you can imagine, for next to zero money. You can also connect a keyboard and a mouse to it, and with a bluetooth app - operate it remotely with another phone.
I like the idea of the video of using old phone in projects. Cz it's not a waste it also contain a processor in it. 🙌🙌
Okay. Open questions:
- What about soldering to some pads to turn the phone on and off?
- What if the phone doesn't want constant voltage? Seems to be especially a problem when booting up but I also heard about devices where the percentage still decreases over time... I think the temperature contact(s) should somehow be taken care off...
- What happens if somebody puts in a charger at the USB port while the phone is powered by constant voltage instead of by a battery? Will that just be fine?
Ideally I would like to have a solution that allows to either connect some random battery (of the same type ofc to keep it simple...) or a power supply thus that a phone that stays at one place for the majority of time could also be taken with to somewhere if necessary.
Great innovation. I bet most people have an old phone or two lying around.
it would be cool if you sold this as a kit to convert existing smartphones as SBCs!
Oh wow, this video was informative, short and in a very structured way. Appreciate the time you took to create this. I hope to give it a try.
I've always wanted to see this happen!
Thank you for making my dream come true!!
There should be a standardized/popularized app & PCB to do this with old Android and possibly Apple devices, so DIYers don't have to do all of this themselves.
Make it
So make it happen
@@chasewatkins3096 @lshxggyl There are many different ports, phones, and reasons that people will want to use a RasPi. And if you're just using it as a server, none of this is needed.
Next up, install an RTOS or a minimal android to reduce power and processing wastage.
Aosp based rom without gapps last way longer
Можно убрать Android и написать свой простой графический интерфейс для ядра Linux. Про этот процесс писал в своём текстовом блоге Monobogdan. Ещё он использовал порты GPIO на материнской плате смартфона, чтобы подключить стик геймпада и внешний модем GSM
i do it more simpler: use serial app on phone, and control arduino/esp like that. Easier, reliable, dont need specific apps, just a serial one.
This way you can only use the screen of the phone
But in this case you also need to program the Arduino to react on these serial commands. And you cannot build your custom UI.
intresting. i would use this to implement something like i2c protocoll to get a few more i/O ports. also there are a lot of i2c sensors out there. also the cameras, gyro and a lot of other stuff can be used in the app...
im not sure what projekts i will do but i will try this.
Sure, there are also USB to I2C converter ICs available that you can interface with this method.
@@DoctorVoltcheck information about GPIO ports on smartphone's mainboard. You can connect gamepad stick or external GSM modem without using USB OTG
Do you got any update?? Haha i’ve been curious about that too. For the serial to I2C can use CH341T module and for IO expansion board can use PCF8575
Would love to see more videos like this. I have a semi dead S9+ I'm using as a webcam and a few other phones lying around. Would love to use them for something useful :)
i was waiting for this video damn, youtube algo makes me reach you
I been saying this for years and nobody listens
Sorry, what?
Obviously, you should've have made a video instead! 🤷
A lot of people can say, but only a few can do.
YOu had me at the custom board to replace the batteries. That alone is worth a SUBSCRIBE! Continued Success!
Comparing a used android phone to a raspberry pi is like comparing a used kenworth semi truck with a trailer to a brand new base model f150 that doesnt even come with a bed on its frame. The fact that a used phone even has a battery and a decent screen makes it way better depending on what project your doing.
I saw a samsung galaxy s5 from 2014 fall from the sky the otherday and into a park thankfully was closed off for construction. I think someone dropped it from the condo above. I climbed the fense to get into the park and found a samsung s5 in the dirt, unfortunately not battery, the Gods must be crazy!
That would be cool to use that for a fancy on-off switch and diagnostic tool for a geiger counter.
Even the older phones wont charge nor work with a simple plus and minus supply on its battery connector! You have to put a resistor between the battery sensor pin. Out of my mind I think its a 2.4k resistor or something around that. I have very old phones and none will work by simply connectingn plus and minus to the battery pins.
The resistor you mentioned is actually a thermal resistor that prevents the battery from being charged when it is too hot or too cold. But as in my case I don't want to charge the phone, it also works without it.
@@DoctorVolt As I said. Many phones wont even take the power from the plus and minus without the response of the battery. So all phones that I have wont even work without the resistor.
@@Stinktierchen So I was just lucky that with Galaxy S2 it works without a resistor. But good to know anyway.
@@DoctorVolt Actually for me it worked on a Samsung S3, J5 and Huawei P8 lite with the power wires soldered to the battery BMS (I removed the battery cell because it was dead and the phone had many other problems anyway).
@@Sireoja of course this would work in principle almost every time.
I used to do things like this in high school but would frequently be told what I'm doing is dangerous and I should stop
Guess you could use any phone to program a microcontroller arduino or such..but I thought raspberry pi has a microcontroller chip you can buy also. The phone got a nice display interface though.
I'm not sure why, so bear with me, but I clearly see someone watching this video 10 years from now, from a hard drive labeled 'very useful - don't waste' in a bunker while hiding from the UN.
Thanks for posting something very useful and not to be wasted (I'm going to download this one and put it on the HD, even though I've only used a soldering iron twice in my life).
Every Maker would argue.. Damn.. why the heck did i trash my old crap phone ..
Everything is okay until he solders the battery and directly connects with the branch power supply, he can do the same with esp32 and send data using wifi or with bluetooth, and doesn't even need any soldering or opening the phone.
Can I do this with now adays android phone?
@@davesmith-pj3dg ua-cam.com/video/CXw1Z5V42NY/v-deo.htmlsi=RuDCD8uB4KPNfimv
It's a wireless module with Bluetooth and wifi so I believe it would be possible to communicate with the phone using the USB port on the phone.
best use for an old mobile I have ever seen awesome
That's Arduino level, not Pi. You can control electeonics with it, but you can't use it as a computer cause all the parts are heavily integrated (unlike RPi).
Use guitar pcik for separating shells. No marks, easier.
I'm wanting to make a device similar to the Solid Eye from MGS4, and I was planning to use a Raspberry Pi, but since I already have a old moto e5 with all components, might as well use it. I'm pretty new to this type of science tho
You can also use the aux/headset jack as a low rate I/O interface.
Yo! Great stuff brother ! Keep it up 💪🏻🔥
Some phones need a 10k resistor connected between ground and the middle pin to fool the battery temperature sensing or else the phone won't start up. Also, some phones need a constantly connected USB charger as well, otherwise the non-existing battery can "discharge" over time, because the percentage gets calculated by the phone's dumb software. So, if the phone starts becoming warm with a connected charger, simply connect the "battery" positive trough a diode instead. If this is not enough, connect a 16V 1000µF & 10V 2200µF capacitor between the "battery" positive and negative for some additional capacity. ⚡
I made my old "Lenovo A2010" running from a 4.5V mains adaptor this way, because I only used it in my room and I didn't wanted to make the aftermarket battery into a pillow over time. It's stable, it successfully shows the clock since months, but it can't work in case of a power outage. 📱
Very nice! Was just thinking about using usb interface to controll my circuit. So happy you implemented it here! Very inspiring!
It's not so linear to use phones for appliances, I once developed a product that I worked on where we end up giving up of using a tablet and start using a LCD with microcontroller because of instability particularities and bugs in the android system and that could not happen by any means on our products.
Can You make a video on how to connect a laptop display with an old smartphone motherboard
I think it's a really cool idea. Couldn't have come up with it myself but.
First you go "Dissecting a mobile phone"
and then you go "With an OTG adapter cable we can easily connect it"
So, why did you disassemble the phone?
Just to show that soldering any wires to access IO signals would be pointless.
Damn music is so jolly i was dancing while learning 😂
We could use this as a fast iot board, something as simple as hosting apps via ssh ing into the phone and deploying docker there
So much more is possible but I wanna try using an old phone as a server
They have 4-8 cores, 1-4 gig rams, a very efficient arm processor, builtin wifi and ble
You are Gunther Hermann from Deus Ex. Awesome Indie Bro
It's a very nice ideia! But the problem is that the phone like a general purpose computer,. It's not a dedicated device. For example if the power runs out, the Android will restart and you will be in the home screen.... not in the app that control the USB.
You can use Tasker to autostart apps.
brilliant! and I LOVE the little 'audio bling' comedy! GREAT subject! I guess I better start learning Android....
0:05 The speaker is located above camera module, this is the vibrating alert motor.
Nice work. You can just use OTG adapter with charging input instead of DC/DC converter. The battery is needed for UPS
Yes, but this only powers the attached devices, not the phone itself.
@@DoctorVolt yes , but type c phone you can charge it and powers the attached device. OTG with two usb connectors, one for input ( charging) the other one for the device
with rs485 modbus i/o device you can read digital and analog ios via modbus read coil write contact and read / write holding register commands. you will need usb tu rs485 converter for about 5 usd
Hey, is there a way to turn your old phone into a smart speaker??? I want to know how to do this since the phone has all the hardware needed to make one.
This music makes me happy, its like Christmas music
Hackers unite! This is a fresh take actually. It's been a while since ive seen anyone coming up with new innovative projects
This reminds me of the old Android "ioio" boards... Nice Work!
This is the kind of video internet need
Hmmm. A digital dashboard from multiple of the old samsungs.
Which also turn on and enter sleep mode from car key or signal from the ECU
I like the idea of having a custom board that replaces the battery and have the wires out for connecting to power source. are there ready-made ones that can adjust the voltage to the acceptable range for the phone?
Unfortunately not. At least i have never seen such boards.
Instead of using the transistor Open Collector on the USB to RS232 board to short out the LED (which wastes energy), why not just use it to provide the Ground (-) to the LED?
Hi, can we use our charging adapter wires to connect directly to the battery terminals. I think if we can do that it could be an efficient way to turn our phone into a wireless camera that can be accessed over the local wifi network.
What about installing Node.js or Python and running javascript or python scripts? Much simpler to write.
I have an Amazon Firestick that is going out. It's still usable, but it is getting slower & slower. I've been wanting to replace it, but after watching this video I think that it's possible to have an android phone (that's cheap because it has a cracked screen) to run the Prime Video app and then Play store apps on my TV. Then I would want a device to replace the Firestick remote; maybe with a Bluetooth mini keyboard & trackpad. The advantage of an android phone is that it can be much more powerful than a Firestick and even many smart TVs. Then that allows for mobile gaming on my living room TV. It also makes me wonder if smart phones could run Batocera (retro gaming focused Linux distro). Hmm...
You are free to use this idea for a video.
Android phones are likely to run alternative Linux Distros, but Android already has pretty good retrogaming capabilities with it's RetroArch
Nice project. The use of a FTDI USB adapter is rather limited. But what would be really cool is to move to an Arduino Nano and implement a firmware that lets the pins / functions mapping be set from Android app and then command executed remotely. This would allow the implementation of analogRead/Write and maybe also some basic I2C functionality (like reading / writing bytes).
I was also thinking of that. But finally I decided for the solution that's more effortless to implement. (You only need to program the phone, not both phone and MCU)
Die Aussprache hat mich gekillt😂
I’d be happy to give you my old HTC phone so you can waste your time trying to convert the phone. I’d rather buy the raspberry pi with the necessary OS and software to get the job done. Samsung Galaxy is easier to mod as it was more popular. Also I have a bunch of old blackberry phones too. Are these worth trying to tinker with?
How to power the old phone and use the arduino board at the same time? Programming in android studio is much more complicated than python on re raspberry pi.
Raspberry pi has much more connectivity options and it's not very expensive.
One BIG caveat: the old phone will run old super old software, with all the security issues. Fine for tinkering projects, not so much for anything that could be used as an attack vector into your home network (such as a non-local webserver). Also Coding for Android pre 4 is annoying imho.
You can sometimes fix this with a custom ROM, but that makes this a lot more effort. Depending a lot on the phone/tablet.
Another option would be to enable a guest network on your router, this will put a firewall between your unsafe devices and your online banking and what not machines.
(Plenty of phones with newer android laying around though)
Finally a good end: do consider using termux to get a more linux-like experience on android, with packages, scripting, python, and stuff like that.
Instructive, thank you! You just earned a new subscriber.
Nice reuse of old hardware! Thanks for the video
Very true! Pi 5 is slow and using old process. The thermal is really bad on Pi 5.
The Pi 5 is built on a newly designed and released Broadcom CPU, which is equivalent in performance to the Heilo G99 by Mediatek, that many people use in their smartphones.
While it isn’t exactly ideal to use it without an active cooler, performance wise it will still run better than its predecessor, while keep in roughly the same temperature as the pi 4.
@@Brain_pocketer
1. For some tests, 3Ghz Pi5 is slower than 2.2 Ghz Pi4B. And much slower than RK3588 2.4Ghz.
2. Pi 5 is 16nm, G99 is 6nm. Pi 5 is really HOT!
BTW, the TCO of G99 is much lower than Pi 5. I love G99 very much.
You are on to something big here
I have a question. I bought ft232,but how to connect it to breadboard? You plugged something in the bottom of the chip, but what is it? Btw i don't have arduino, just electronics set.
Never mind, jumper wires solved my problem. One jumper wire to vcc and + and one to gnd and -
Yeah, what about I2C, SPI, Digital IO, PWM? A SBC is considerably more versatile. Additionally, the linux kernel on android is older than the ones on these sbcs.
My issue with this example is that you could easily get a microcontroller to do the same task, costing less than the $5 someone might ask for an old phone...
Tbh, I thought that you were gonna install rasbian, or work with the bare metal hardware...
How do I wire up an e-ink display to a phone, without the necessary components getting more expensive than a raspi, and the interface being USB?
But you're entirely right, a raspi is basically a phone platform without all the sensors and display.
The advantage over Raspi, Arduino etc. is that you get strong CPU and almost all sensors for free. (if you haven't disposed your old phones)
@@DoctorVolt that's also correct, but you still have a huge overhead by running a fully featured android on top of it... and in return, your I/O is limited to an RS232 connection wrapped in more overhead, because it has to use the USB protocol.
But you're right, you do get a lot of sensors and potentially both Bluetooth and Internet hardware and stack for free.
It's just quite limited how much I/O you get. If you want to control relays for instance, you easily end up paying more for the electronic components to adapt to USB as you would pay for a RasPi or clone, that has direct I/O pins.
I wonder if it's possible to use a phone as home assistant
"your fingernail is a great tool to use" 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Removable battery, fm radio, earphone jack...are these things part of the future?
Damn embedded system engineers. They can turn any device into a computer nowadays.
Interesting demonstration. Its easier to use an esp8266 wifiAP for $5 and do the same thing with the web browser. But I get the point of this video.
True but maybe you get more ram, camera, gps with the phone.
But yeah, host a webpage with an openAP with esp is easy!!
Idk if its possible, but with a usb c, a video capture card, an esp32, the app to read the video from the capture card it could be possible to make an ambilight