Repurposing Old Smartphones for Home Automation | Hacker News Reader

Repurposing Old Smartphones for Home Automation

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111 pointsashitlerferad20 comments

Though it's not on this level of sophistication, I'm using three old Android phones as wireless security cameras. Anyone else doing the same?

The phones are running a free IP camera app, while in airplane mode, with WiFi turned on. Then, I've got an old whitebox (PIII / 1GB RAM) running Lubuntu, that monitors the feeds via Motion[1]. Everything is isolated on a subnet, where WAN access is denied. If needed, it's easy to allow remote access to the whitebox and/or camera feeds, automatic FTP uploads of captured data, and email alerts.

It was unbelievably simple to set up, completely free, and it works like a charm. The most difficult part was physically positioning the phones. You could get fancy and use ZoneMinder, but Motion's footprint is tiny enough that the old Lubuntu machine doesn't even break a sweat (7-12% CPU / 10% RAM total, including the OS).

[1] http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

Which android phones are you using? I'm guessing they can not be too old.

Two of them are circa 2012 Samsung SCH-S720C (1GHz CPU / 512MB RAM), running Gingerbread. I don't want to pull the third one down to look, but it's a little newer, maybe a Galaxy S3.

They're not nearly as old as the whitebox, but they're old in smartphone terms, and there are millions of them floating around that can be had for dirt cheap. Mine are just phones that I upgraded from, they were doing nothing but gathering dust.

A couple months ago I setup an old Android phone to be a 3G hotspot for some ESP8266 devices. It also created a SSH reverse tunnel so that I could access the devices from the internet. After rooting the phone, compiling autossh & nginx and getting the whole system setup, the phone broke. At this point it was cheaper and way easier to just get a RasberryPi with a 3G dongle. So unless you have lots of the same old phone lying around this can be a lot more work than the alternatives. Using something like http://janos.io/ may have made things a bit easier but device support was an issue.

Getting a Dropbear or OpenSSH server set up on Android can be a mess. For a super simple setup that "just works", you can just use a SSH server application (e.g. Rooted SSH/SFTP Daemon [0]) and a ZeroTier virtual network [1] so that you can access the devices from the Internet.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=web.oss.sshsft...

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zerotier.o...

Yeah, I've got a couple of old android phones here that would be useful for repurposing, if they would actually get out of the bootloader.

Related to repurposing an old smartphone, specifically a firefox OS phone, is JanOS: http://janos.io/

Not really under active development, it seems, especially with FirefoxOS going bye bye, but it basically boots you right into the browser, no cruft or chrome, and puts you in "god mode" with access to everything possible through Mozilla's special "web api" stuff. It's pretty neat, and fun, and really got me jazzed about the idea of repurposing $30 phones to do cool stuff. You can't even get a GSM radio for dev boards for $30, much less the screen, battery, charging circuitry, accelerometer, etc.

Does anybody know of a stripped down android install that is similar? Maybe scriptable with javascript or lua, basic browser-based display available?

I suppose the obvious answer here is cyanogenmod.

This sort of repurposing is how I got the most use out of my Firefox phone (Geeksphone Peak). There's a fork of FirefoxOS called JanOS[1] intended for powering IoTs, which I came across before FirefoxOS pivoted.

I ended up keeping a footbag[2] ontop of the proximity sensor and when it was removed, it would notify my office-mates (via slack) that it was time to stop working and come play some footbag :) Source is on GitHub[3]

[1] http://janos.io/about.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footbag

[3] https://github.com/staydecent/footbag-os

This could be really useful.

A simple way to get started on Android can be "Automagic".

It lets you trigger actions based on events and conditions.

Events can be almost anything the phone can sense.

Actions can be almost anything the phone can do including sending requests over http(s), mail or sms.

(Not affiliated, just like it.)

yes. looks interesting. for anyone else curious about Automagic, the site is here: https://automagic4android.com/en/

Didn't know about Automagic, seems interesting. I use Tasker, but I find it a pain to do any complex logic. The flowcharts in that app are probably much easier to use.

Some of the reviews in the app store says they are from former tasker users, so I guess you are right. I never really used tasker so I cannot say.

This is brilliant. I turned my old iPhone 4 into a server to listen for my Amazon Dash buttons.

Would you mind writing up how you did so? I've got a box of old cellphones laying around, and at least two of them are old iphones.

Sort-of-edit: I knew that username sounded familiar! Hey Leonard!

Direct link to talk, e.g. for mobile users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RWSXlai6PE

I'll also note that old phones with OLED screens make nice capable digital clocks with streaming, etc. LCD screens aren't nearly as nice because you can always see the backlight.

Sounds cool, but I think you can achieve a lot of this with tasker.

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