Dashcam, webcam, or security cam / motion sensor Remote, touchpad, or keyboard for TVs or PCs Smart house controls / mini dashboard
Most of that may require repairing the dodgy USB though...
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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Does the keyboard boot up in seconds, so the phone can be stored off and charged once a year like a normal bluetooth keyboard?
external GPS server
GPS → old phone (calculates position) → bluetooth → current phone
This relieves your current phone of the workload of tracking and calculating a fix, which costs energy. Bluetooth uses much less energy so your current phone only burns energy keeping the LCD lit. It would increase navigation range on a charge because effectively you would be using two batteries. Also avoiding the battery performance hit due to heat because the processing is distributed. The problem is I think no FOSS nav apps support external GPS. There are FOSS apps and drivers to feed and read the mock gps but the nav apps don’t use it.
bluetooth radio receiver:
Old phone has bluetooth enabled and pairs with whoever at the party wants to be the DJ. The headphone output goes to a channel on the (otherwise bluetooth-incapable) mixer or amp.
fake hotspot:
Setup a hotspot with no internet uplink. Use the SSID as a bumper sticker (e.g. “ImpeachTrump_optout_nomap!”). You could theoretically run a web server on the phone which redirects all access attempts to a captive portal that broadcasts whatever msg you want (e.g. anti-Trump memes or announcements for neighbors). It need not give WAN access.
Maybe incorporate Rumble: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.disrupted.rumble/
cryptocurrency:
It could serve as an offline/airgapped cryptocurrency wallet.
car telemetry:
Keep the old phone permanently in the car and attached to the OBD.
Do you know of any resources or guides on how to do that fake hotspot? I think it'd be so fun to do a little network-announcements thing.
No, I have no links or guides. It was an off-the-cuff idea. But speculatively, I would assume you could start by following one of many guides on how to configure an Android as a functional hotspot, such as:
- https://www.androidauthority.com/mobile-hotspot-setup-631280/
- https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Mobile-Hotspot-Without-Using-Data
Then cut off the uplink by removing the SIM chip or going into airplane mode (then re-enable wi-fi). I’ve not tested that. From there, if that works, you would need a web server. F-droid has a few prospects:
Ideally you would also have a redirection mechanism that acts like a captive portal and redirects all traffic to your server. That’s getting a bit beyond me.. perhaps a firewall like Netguard or AFwall could do that, but I’m not sure.
Saved, thanks!
Hmm, sadly that device specifically seems to have issues with PostmarketOS: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_5_(google-redfin)
I use an old phone that doesn't hold a charge as an always-on Home Assistant kiosk. Even if you don't run Home Assistant, there might be some other sort of dashboard-like thing that could be useful to have always visible.
I actually do even operate my home server with Home Assistant already! :)
But if I feel the need to have a dashboard display somewhere, I would like to use something with an e-ink display instead and then integrate it properly.
But, at least right now, I barely have something one might call a smart home, and therefore not as many use cases for HA just "because it's neat".