Android is in full control of the hardware, meaning it will force your application to stop at random weird moments, that's why it can't be used for anyting reliable. Imagine you have built a drone using old android phone, you have evrything, hd camera, gps, lte, gyro, lot of ram, space and cpu power, just that your drone might just stop responding because android will just kill the app that controls it. That's the problem.
So… nothing really useful. The only practical thing that doesn’t involve a lot of work is to use off the shelf applications. Best of you root it and install linux for android. And to do what you did with the usb-serial can be done, and more, with bluetooth-serial-485 and others. Seems you demonstrated that a pi (or similar) is still way more practical for many applications. But if you need a touch screen and a camera it certainly may be worth using a good old android like that galaxy s2 (It was my first smartphone and still works fine, not like its successors 😂).
I don't see any practical value for this. This can't be used with inputs, sensors, etc. Plus FTDI is costly, the better solution would be a cheaper WCH microcontroller, and communicate over serial with a special bootloader.
Hi, can we use our charging adapter wires to connect directly to the battery terminals. I think if we can do that it could be an efficient way to turn our phone into a wireless camera that can be accessed over the local wifi network.
I am amased by the creators of Gigatron. Imagine this low cost computer with such specs (resolution and colors - more than Atari800XL/C64/Amstrad not mentioning ZX Spectrum) appearing in 1985 ? Everybody would love to have such computer and be able to asembly it themselves! At the price 1/10 of Atari/C64. That makes me sad it was not invented back then....
It is so far from replacing Raspberry Pi that I'm missing words to express how poor the title of this video is. Yes, it's nice that you can do it with the old smartphone instead of throwing it to garbage. Still, this is not Raspberry Pi replacement at all. Nice work, but poor title.
I wish it was easy to install raspbian or any linux on a smartphone. I already tinkered with termux which is nice but limited, true linux install would make those smartphones perfect micro servers
@@yotoprules9361 thanks, i wasn't aware of this distrib. I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 (2015) already running with custom android. I will try postmarketOS !!! If it works they will get my $upport. Otherwise i will keep in mind that list for next time i get a smartphone, getting those noname chinese removes the fun of installing a custom os.
@@DoctorVolt yes , but type c phone you can charge it and powers the attached device. OTG with two usb connectors, one for input ( charging) the other one for the device
One BIG caveat: the old phone will run old super old software, with all the security issues. Fine for tinkering projects, not so much for anything that could be used as an attack vector into your home network (such as a non-local webserver). Also Coding for Android pre 4 is annoying imho. You can sometimes fix this with a custom ROM, but that makes this a lot more effort. Depending a lot on the phone/tablet. Another option would be to enable a guest network on your router, this will put a firewall between your unsafe devices and your online banking and what not machines. (Plenty of phones with newer android laying around though) Finally a good end: do consider using termux to get a more linux-like experience on android, with packages, scripting, python, and stuff like that.
Why would you use possibly the worst board option for GPIO? Something like a Pico has way more functionality for GPIO that you can control over a usb-serial interface. It can also be a lot smaller and cheaper.
I've been using an old Samsung S8 and two S10s for a portable baby monitor and two media centers for years now. The media center capability of Samsung DeX is amazing - you just slap a HDMI hub to the phone, connect it to a TV or an unused monitor and you have the most advanced android smart TV you can imagine, for next to zero money. You can also connect a keyboard and a mouse to it, and with a bluetooth app - operate it remotely with another phone.
I can't see the proclamed equivalence between old android phone and raspberry pi. You have just connected USB device with 4 GPIO pins and blinked with them like kid on first lesson of arduino programming. No linux shell, only android apps are working, you have to use limiting android API... Why did you even disassembled it? You didn't touched single componnent inside. Almost every other old device with some level of smartness would be beter for this use. There are tons of devices runing embedded linux, which can be hacked easily. Routers, set-top boxes, fuckin coffee machines... This video was complete waste of my time.
