this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
70 points (98.6% liked)

Selfhosted

40313 readers
185 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] vvv@programming.dev 19 points 8 months ago (4 children)

The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You've probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!

Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.

[–] octoblade@lemmynsfw.com 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

In my experience using an older android phone for self-hosting, the downside was a lack of ports and I/O. Being stuck with a single USB 2 interface and wifi was less than ideal for my use case.

[–] Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

USB/IP for a KVM switch might still work, as long as termux supports all that

[–] zewu@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Imagine the single USB C port being 40Gbit/s or even 80Gbit/s (USB 4 Version 2). Given a nice docking station and some additional enclosures, you could technically even connect hard drives and run the phone as a low-power NAS. Or/and as a multimedia station for your 4K TV, I mean the integrated GPUs are usually more than capable enough.

A bummer that they stick to USB 2 speeds, even for most high end phones.

[–] SomeBoyo@feddit.de 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The battery might prove to be a liability.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah, if they are old enough those might be removable? Then again, from that time period they might be slower than RPis...

[–] Lifebandit666@feddit.uk 2 points 8 months ago

I have an old phone as a bedside clock with Home Assistant as the Dash

[–] halm@leminal.space 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you have good resources, advice or experiences to share for somebody wanting to set their old Androids to work?

[–] vvv@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

I don't have a particular guide at the tip of my fingers, but I can share some recommendations based on my experience:

  • prefer a phone with USB-c if you plan on connecting USB things to it. the otg adapters for micro-b are kinda hit and miss when it comes to keeping the phone connected to power as well.
  • look out for clearances of those carrier locked prepaid phones from physical stores, you can get nice devices for nearly nothing
  • whatever you're running on the phone, make sure it starts at startup, so you don't need to go launching everything if you reboot for some reason
  • if the phone is"mission critical" e.g. random restart while in the middle of a print is unacceptable, turn off all the automatic updates and such.
  • a VNC server has been helpful, to remotely poke at the phone if I'm too lazy to go do it physically
  • get something that'll keep the screen off the phone on. I've encountered reduced performance regardless of what battery optimizations I've turned off without doing that but YMMV depending on ROM.

I fully expect the screen thing and the batteries bring in there constantly charging to kill the phones I'm using eventually, but it's something I expect and accept. my octoprint phones have been fine so far, for a bit over a year 🤷‍♂️