Hi,
Which things can I do with an old android phone ? Like a Xiaomi mi a3.
Hi,
Which things can I do with an old android phone ? Like a Xiaomi mi a3.
Take the battery out of it. Put on lineage OS. Use it as a microserver, mine some crypto like monero. Because it's CPU-based. You could use it as a remote for other devices. You could use it as a webcam for your house. It can do everything it used to do.
Old lithium batteries become a fire hazard, so I would recommend removing it if you can. Or at least replacing it with the new battery. Good practice at least even if you break it
Leaving an airplane mode, don't use the cellular modem, you're not getting any hardware driver updates. So it's security risk. Don't do anything too sensitive with it. But just for you around home network it's fine
large hardware support portfolio, i think its the single most widely compatible ROM. As long as one crazy maintainer hangs on to your device, you will get lineage updates.
Just because you forgo hardware driver security updates, doesn't mean you should stop getting android security updates.
Depends on the design of the phone. Some will work just fine off of USB power. Some will try to detect a battery and then fail the boot. For the ones that are more troublesome you'll have to Google the instructions on to make a dummy battery load. The important thing is to get the lithium ion battery out of the circuit.
I do same. Don't got any accounts logged in either on it and just runs f-droid apps and Aurora store. It's reason I value physical Sims since it makes it easy to swap when I need to without having to sign in to anything, since it's my accountless phone that if I lost has nothing of importance in it.
I use mine as a camera in the garage when I'm working on my car so I don't get my current phone all greasy.
Install Pixel Experience, and use it to upload photos to your Google account without consuming your Google Drive data allotment.
I do the same thing. The camera on my old phone is much better than the one built into my laptop. And even though the phone's battery is pretty much dead, that doesn't matter since I have it hooked up and powered via usb all the time.
I use an IP webcam app and run my old S10+ as a CCTV camera inside my garage, viewable in Home Assistant.
The app lets the screen turn off. I have it plugged in to a smart power switch, and have the HA Android app installed.
This way, I can monitor the phone's battery level with HA and use automation to keep the battery charged between 40% and 80%.
Nice, I will check that app. In the past I used to separate apps for that and screen off didn't work well, it would wake even if nothing happened.
Honestly, the screen being on doesn't really worry me too much now, and I suspect an Android change in the past few releases has made it less reliable when the app tries to do it, because I'll occasionally walk by and see that it's on.
I've set the brightness all the way down and it sits up at ceiling height, on top of a wall-mounted network cabinet. I remote control it from my computer, using scrcpy (requires adb over TCP/IP).
I planned on using mine for making sort of futuristic terminals around my home. That said, my phones never grow old in my hands. Someone always inherits them before they are due.
I am hooking up mine to a projector and using it to drive my home theater. Sound is handled by a bluetooth speaker. Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it a better experience for watching movies on TV? Absolutely.
Home Assistant, learn about it. You could turn your phone into a camera viewer, light switch, smart weather provider, detection device with Bluetooth. Etc.
I usually give mine away, that said by the time I'm done with a phone it's usually pretty used up
My old one plus phone is esim compatible and I wouldn't be mad if it broke or was stolen. I've made it my travel phone.
You can use it for a Briar mailbox. Briar is a privacy focused messaging with no centralized server.
Instead you can use an old smartphone to act as a server to collect and distribute messages between you and your friends/family.