Up until a few days ago, I've had a Google Pixel 5.
I used it for about 3-4 years, but I had to replace it due to its' hardware failing and it hitting EOL software support wise.
Especially the USB-C port is damaged, and the battery is drained in just one blink of an eye.
Said device is now lying around in the drawer, and I want to find a good use out of it.
It's still a fine phone. Like all those phones other people have in their drawer. It's probably faster than my homeserver, has cameras, sensors, wireless connections, and much more.
It has GrapheneOS installed, and is still more or less secure, probably even more than 80% of other android phones right now I guess?
**Do you have any ideas for what I can repurpose it?
**
I know that there's Octo4a, which can turn it into an Octoprint server for my 3D-printer, but I already have a Raspberry Pi for that, and as said, the phone has an unstable USB connection.
Maybe I could use it for my photography equipment, e.g. as remote shutter?
external GPS server
GPS → old phone (calculates position) → bluetooth → current phoneThis 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:
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.