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Comment by _lce0 | Hacker News Reader

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_lce0

I've found the phone specs[0] and seems to be pretty good for thinkers and makers!

There's plenty of sensors --and opportunities-- for less than $10.

- Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 1.2 GHz Dual-Core MSM8610

- 1.9 GHz CDMA PCS, 800 MHz CDMA

- 65K Color TFT, 480 x 320 pixels, 3.8" (HVGA)

- 1,540 mAh / 7hours talk - 9day stand by

- microSD 4Gb (included) -- up to 32Gb

- 3MP Rear-Facing Fixed Focus Camera with Flash and WVGA Camcorder

- Accelerometer

- 802.11 b/g/n

- Bluetooth 4.0

- GPS

I'd like of another sensors not listed there; like light, proximity, or magnetic .. maybe anyone with the phone can confirm?

[0] http://www.lg.com/us/cell-phones/lg-L16C-lucky

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possible home automation projects: - ultra cheap smart wifi motion sensor (using the camera) or vibration sensor (i.e. stick it to a window and u can use the accelerometer to detect break ins).

- car GPS tracker (its actually smaller than dedicated ones)

I usually keep older phones that get replaced after 2-3 years so they can be used for similar projects. The most basic are just glorified remotes for all of the various controllable things in my house. Get a wall mount/charger and they make good switches for Hue lights, controllers for casting audio to various rooms, and stuff like that.

In the past I'd see low end devices for $50 or less but $10 is honestly hard to believe. Even if all you use it for is a handful of desktop widgets that turn things on/off that's already cheaper than some regular remotes and switches, much less ones that give you information and can be customized to look however I want or perform different tasks.

yeah $10 is kind of crazy, probably subsidised prize. I keep my older phones too, have been using old android devices as Airplay receivers for music, hooked up to speakers in different rooms.

Would be nice to use them for voice control too, I am hoping Amazon will release some Alexa apps/APIs that are not tied to specific hardware

Better than a raspberry PI?

Built in battery, built in display, and cheaper. Better for some uses I'm sure.

Well, you lose on documentation, community, IO ports, USB ports, and potentially hackability. The first two of those are the most significant IMHO.

IO ports might be doable - https://github.com/mik3y/usb-serial-for-android

Agree with you on 1. and 2. though. One day you'll be able to run full linux on more hardware like this

Can someone get one to me in Australia? (Happy to pay)

Will reshipping service like Shipito work for you? https://shipito.com

Shipito is beyond awful.

Hey, I was just looking at Shipito, and it was looking pretty handy to me as a Canadian. What did you dislike?

The problems start once your package is in their warehouse. Sometime they increase the price, sometime they keep asking for more and more proofs of identity, income, address. Sometime they refuse to accept documents not verified in an US embassy in your country. If you refuse their demands they keep/steal your package. Just go on a few review sites and search for Shipito.

Huh? Works fine for me...

What's awful about Shipito? It worked for me.

Does Australia use CDMA and not GSM?

I think it uses GSM. But even then, it'd probably still be worth it simply as an ARM-in-a-box-with-wifi-battery-screen-and-input-device. I've been wondering about the hackability of a cheapo Sony Ericsson featurephone, available in the UK for about £10, for much the same reason.

With this thing, I'd much prefer to wipe Android from it completely and install a custom Linux (or BSD) distribution, to get more control over how it works. Unfortunately, while this is most likely possible, by the time it gets stable the phone will probably have vanished from the market. The profit margin on these cheap devices is so slow it only takes a tiny market shift to drive them into unprofitability.

I've been stalling on a project to run Debian on the Nexus 4 - maybe an older device would be easier (?). It's Qualcomm, so maybe the same serial-over-headphone jack trick works [1]

1: http://blog.voltagex.org/2015/08/01/booting-the-nexus-4-from...

I am, right now, trying to beat a Nexus 7 into running stock Linux. I am failing.

Looks like Ubuntu, Bodhi and something else all came out with distros for the N7, and then all gave up on them. The only current one is Ubuntu Touch, which is a total dead loss. (They've disabled apt-get...)

At the moment I'm trying to run a Debian userland in a chroot, and it's not working particularly well. If only Android supported virtualisation!

Blog about it and/or email me.

It depends which Nexus 7, but your path will be something like mine: get a kernel running (even if it doesn't complete booting), get libhybris [1] working, get userland working.

You're going to need some kind of serial-out for this.

1: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris/porte...

Edit: https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo may be useful for both of us

you can use apt-get (and everything else you'd expect) with Ubuntu Touch, just disable the read only mode

Qualcomm SOC abandon all hope!

Hope for what?

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