> If you have a smartphone and don't have a raspberry pi or other SBC and have some use for an under powered Linux box then have fun.
The situation I imagine for this is that a big solar flare comes and takes down the internet for the foreseeable future. There's all kinds of things that are going to stop working because they want to phone home, but cant. Many of them will just be trash at that point, but some can be hacked to respect some other server on the local LAN--that server might be a repurposed phone.
These might be important things. Farm equipment, thermostats, vehicles... The more control we can have over hardware that'll be easy to find, the better.