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.
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.
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.
@@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
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.
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
@@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.
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.
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.
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 TH-cam.
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.
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 is also a modified Debian distro.
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.
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).
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
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)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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 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.
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?
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 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!
do you use a standard Android app for ip-cam?! I would like to use one as cctv, but want to be able to re-start it remotely (rather than having to physically access it, requiring ladder, dismantling enclosure etc)
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.
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?
tried to use an old phone with a broken screen as the "brain" for a spotify stereo with touch screen on it, but just could not get it to work properly without a battery in it, tried something very similar to this but just got stuck in a boot loop and could not figure out how to do it😮💨 Any chance for a video trying different ways to bypass batteries? 😅 Would be great so you can reuse a lot of old electronics with either dead or bad batteries or just to make it safer to use for longer periods without having an old phone battery blow up 😁 in any case, great video! like & subbed ^^
I've said this since smart phones came out. Why wouldn't they be better than a damn pi or Arduino..... Stupid to think it was just now discovered to be A COMPUTER I YOU HAND. Only difference would be the output and input interface pins
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).
Bro, what is the overhead of running the arduino code over the android os? Does this method utilise a good amount of the prosessor's power and can it saturate the bandwidth limits of the usb interface ?! Loved this video. Thanks. I'd just love to know the possibilities and potential of what you just brought to us. The possibility of this (most cheap old phones) being more powerful than the milk v duo or arduino or esp 32 is very very exciting!
@@DoctorVolt yeah. I wanna know the potential max throughput possible from the i/o of the digital pins. And if it has an equivalent or better processing and output bandwidth than arduino or esp32. Is the digital throughput high enough to potentially utilize the max bandwidth of the usb protocol? I know, too many questions.. sorry about that. But you've got me excited about its potential capabilities!
@@yasirrakhurrafat1142 If I remember right, the maximum frequency it could let an LED blink was around 200 Hertz. I guess that USB/FT232 chip is the bottleneck there. So if you need high speed of the IO signals, you'd better go for Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
@@DoctorVolt oh man! My heart hurts 💔... No worries though.. its still fascinating that an android could even do that. Also, stupd question, what was the device you connected through the usb before you got the gpio? Before connecting to the leds?
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
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.
Fellow programmers, how about using a custom Android image? Oh, and making this app a service? ...Or just making sure it always starts up on startup? Anyway - thanks, Doctor Volt!
The pull-up resistors give you more flexibility if you want to connect components other than LEDs that need to be connected to ground, e.g. logic chips, motor drivers, etc.
Right around the time that the scalpers first started really ruining the prices for the RPis, I had went on a war path trying to explain to the community that this was totally available option. I was basically treated like a leper. Glad to see that I am vindicated and the RPi community is mostly just trash.
Is there a kit to keep the phone on 24/7 without battery but with a simple connection to the wall socket? Basically a kit that does what is done here in a nice package? Or can I order it from someone ? I don't have the experience or equipments to make these at home
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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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.
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?
Using perf board kind of genius actually, i never thinking of that before.Thanks for the tips.
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
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
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.
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 ins one of the most amazing way of using old phones! Congrads!
Great idea for old phones lying around.
This is the concept i have always wondered if it would be possible. Thank you Doc.
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!
People don't usually recognize that phones are fully fledged computers.
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 TH-cam.
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 love the idea! I think I need to buy an FT232 breakout board.
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
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 is also a modified Debian distro.
YOu had me at the custom board to replace the batteries. That alone is worth a SUBSCRIBE! Continued Success!
Great innovation. I bet most people have an old phone or two lying around.
I been saying this for years and nobody listens
best use for an old mobile I have ever seen awesome
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. 🙌🙌
it would be cool if you sold this as a kit to convert existing smartphones as SBCs!
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.
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.
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'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
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
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)
PostmarketOS is best for this.
Curious, have you actually tried implementing it on an android device? It sounds very interesting.
That would be cool to use that for a fancy on-off switch and diagnostic tool for a geiger counter.
i was waiting for this video damn, youtube algo makes me reach you
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 😂
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 th-cam.com/video/CXw1Z5V42NY/w-d-xo.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.
Every Maker would argue.. Damn.. why the heck did i trash my old crap 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.
Can You make a video on how to connect a laptop display with an old smartphone motherboard
this is amazing i have many old phones,
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
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!!
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.
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.
bro used s2 flagship as 5 dollar raspberry
Very nice! Was just thinking about using usb interface to controll my circuit. So happy you implemented it here! Very inspiring!
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
This is the kind of video internet need
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).
Thankyou! So succinct in your explanations. Your ideas are worthy of sharing.
Never throwing an old phone again with this one
i never throw my old phone they all still work today 😂
0:05 The speaker is located above camera module, this is the vibrating alert motor.
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.
I've always wanted to see this happen!
Thank you for making my dream come true!!
This reminds me of the old Android "ioio" boards... Nice Work!
Perfektné! Ďakujem za myšlienku
Wait, you guys have old phones with an intact screen?
Removable battery, fm radio, earphone jack...are these things part of the future?
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
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.
Nice reuse of old hardware! Thanks for the video
Instructive, thank you! You just earned a new subscriber.
I us my old phones as linux web servers. Not really the best choice since wifi can drop randomly, but it works.
This music makes me happy, its like Christmas music
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)
Hi, very good video! thank you!
I have a question! - can old Android phones be used as a Ubuntu server? - hence old phones = rysbery pie? - thank you!
There are certain methods to run Linux on old phones. But I haven't tried them. So I cannot help with this.
You could run Linux directly, even without GPU acceleration tou could use touch and simple UI
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!
This rocks dude!🔥👍
very cool! i'd like to see:
analog in/out (possible?)
use the touchscreen as input/output device for a esp32
You could connect a DAC or ADC to the pins of the FT232.
I used a S2 as an IP camera for about 12 years. But using as a arduino replacement is out of my technical capabilities. but I’ll give this idea a try
do you use a standard Android app for ip-cam?!
I would like to use one as cctv, but want to be able to re-start it remotely (rather than having to physically access it, requiring ladder, dismantling enclosure etc)
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.
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?
tried to use an old phone with a broken screen as the "brain" for a spotify stereo with touch screen on it, but just could not get it to work properly without a battery in it, tried something very similar to this but just got stuck in a boot loop and could not figure out how to do it😮💨
Any chance for a video trying different ways to bypass batteries? 😅
Would be great so you can reuse a lot of old electronics with either dead or bad batteries or just to make it safer to use for longer periods without having an old phone battery blow up 😁
in any case, great video! like & subbed ^^
DO IT JUST DO IT
I've said this since smart phones came out. Why wouldn't they be better than a damn pi or Arduino..... Stupid to think it was just now discovered to be A COMPUTER I YOU HAND. Only difference would be the output and input interface pins
Thanks for Demonstrating this.. (Very Nice to Know) 👍👍
I'm about to make so many projects with this B)
Can we install OpenCV on old phone?
Yes, there is an Android version of OpenCV.
this is very cool i been wanting to get into this kind of stuff and arduino and such
Amazing stuff!
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).
You are Gunther Hermann from Deus Ex. Awesome Indie Bro
Du bist ein Macher 💪
Danke für dieses Video 😌
Bro, what is the overhead of running the arduino code over the android os?
Does this method utilise a good amount of the prosessor's power and can it saturate the bandwidth limits of the usb interface ?!
Loved this video.
Thanks.
I'd just love to know the possibilities and potential of what you just brought to us.
The possibility of this (most cheap old phones) being more powerful than the milk v duo or arduino or esp 32 is very very exciting!
Even at full speed, the UI and other apps still run smoothly. So there is not much impact on the overall performance.
@@DoctorVolt yeah.
I wanna know the potential max throughput possible from the i/o of the digital pins.
And if it has an equivalent or better processing and output bandwidth than arduino or esp32.
Is the digital throughput high enough to potentially utilize the max bandwidth of the usb protocol?
I know, too many questions.. sorry about that.
But you've got me excited about its potential capabilities!
@@yasirrakhurrafat1142 If I remember right, the maximum frequency it could let an LED blink was around 200 Hertz. I guess that USB/FT232 chip is the bottleneck there. So if you need high speed of the IO signals, you'd better go for Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
@@DoctorVolt oh man! My heart hurts 💔...
No worries though.. its still fascinating that an android could even do that.
Also, stupd question, what was the device you connected through the usb before you got the gpio?
Before connecting to the leds?
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
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.
Fellow programmers, how about using a custom Android image?
Oh, and making this app a service?
...Or just making sure it always starts up on startup?
Anyway - thanks, Doctor Volt!
+1
New sub. Excellent presentation.
Greattt!... Fabulous work!...it would be great if other sensors and camera is accessible!
Is there a reason why you control the LED by shunting it with the GPIO pin rather than the more traditional method of connecting Vcc---R---LED---GPIO?
The pull-up resistors give you more flexibility if you want to connect components other than LEDs that need to be connected to ground, e.g. logic chips, motor drivers, etc.
Right around the time that the scalpers first started really ruining the prices for the RPis, I had went on a war path trying to explain to the community that this was totally available option. I was basically treated like a leper. Glad to see that I am vindicated and the RPi community is mostly just trash.
Use the onboard IMU for ML based condition monitoring of an motor system
Incredible work
Use an old phone for a security camera or trail camera.
HI! Nicely done .. is there a way to connect a mosfet to the screen or control the power of the screen from arduino or esp32?
Yes, but it needs some deep knowledge of the Android OS.
Is there a kit to keep the phone on 24/7 without battery but with a simple connection to the wall socket? Basically a kit that does what is done here in a nice package? Or can I order it from someone ? I don't have the experience or equipments to make these at home
It's not possible to make a kit that fits all phones. They are too different.