What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?
I am curious to know what companies and projects are trying to repurpose old phones, laptops and other tech devices.
I feel this area is not explored as much as it should be.
Like converting your phone into a security cam or a radio controlled device, turning laptop into a streaming device etc.
Not a company, but sharing a personal project: I got a free broken 55" TV and turned it into a big daylight panel. I got a great explanation of why this works well (fresnel lens) from the DIY Perks channel on YouTube: Turning Smashed TVs into Realistic Artificial Daylight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4).
The main board had failed so the screen was black and the backlight cycled on and off. After disconnecting the main board, the backlight stayed on. I am using the existing LED lights, but may replace them with the excellent color quality LEDs recommended by DIY Perks.
I have my old Galaxy S1 sitting in my cellar listening to the beeps from my washing machine. It sends me an email when the wash finishes. (I can't hear the beeps from upstairs.)
In an attempt to be more present with one another away from our phooes, my partner and I have (ironically) started using old phones as single-app devices.
For example: we have a "spotiphone" which is an old iPhone with a shattered camera that has only Spotify installed that we use in our bedroom to control music/podcasts. Similar thing for where my partner meditates (but it's an old iPod touch).
Our real phones are usually left by the door when we come home.
An old monitor + previous generation Raspberry Pi: hangs on the kitchen wall to display Find My Friends in kiosk mode. Connected to a timer so it's on in the afternoon until dinner so you can see the family come home. Really cute to see your children move as little picture icons across the map towards you from school.
I have a five year old HP laptop. It was an Elite model, top of the line when I bought it with an i7 processor and SSD.
14 months after I bought it the hinge failed and the screen part physically detached from the base, with only the data/power wire holding them together. This also broke the screen beyond repair.
Low and behold there had been a recall issued on that model to fix the dodgy hinge. Despite me having registered my laptop with HP on day one, they never told me - and the refused to fix it now as it was out of warranty.
So I carefully detached what was left of the screen and was able to disconnect the wires with no issues. I built a box to hold the base, with holes to attach an external monitor and plug stuff in. It now functions as part family media server and computer for the children.
Also never buying HP again.
I don’t know why everyone acts like old laptops aren’t usable, my 2011 MacBook Pro has no HD (the cable died again and I’m not replacing it this time) and it runs from ram just fine (with Linux of course, not OSX)
If you’re not silly you really don’t need much computing power, even then newer laptops aren’t big improvements so if your old one still works I don’t see why you would replace it.
They are attempting to build a os for smartphones based on Alpine linux with the stated goal of supporting a 10 year life cycle. They have a limited list of devices they support but I have heard good things about them.
I have an old iPhone SE plugged in and running a simple web server via (disclosure: my app) http://pocketweb.io
The two sample pages seen there are hosted from this phone.
Edit: There's an Android version available as well.
I run https://motion-project.github.io/index.html on a DELL D400 (I think, it's Core 2 ULV), uploads picture to Gdrive. I set it up when leaving for long vacations.
I used to run a 24/7 server (bittorrent, HTTP) on a fanless PC originally built for cash desks. Got it very cheap, ran several years till the Debian repo actually disappeared!! Consumption was 19W with HDD. It was replaced with a RaspPi and a SSD.
BTW almost all the laptops at home have been bought used (usually in Germany where offer is plenty). All the tablets (Google Nexus 7 1st gen) have been bought used. No regret when kids break one.
I'm in the process of turning my Toshiba Libretto 110CT (a subnotebook from 1998) into a simple remote terminal (over ssh) with custom server software to handle emails, rss feeds, chats and so on. It runs under FreeDOS and connects to WiFi by a combination of PCMCIA ethernet adapter + mobile router with built-in battery. I love the form factor and the "oldschool" keyboard, I have regenerated the battery and it's quite light so it's really portable and handy.
I set up a home movie system on a very old unused laptop. Installed Linux (Xfce) on it because it is very lightweight and connected it to my TV with HDMI. Now I can watch downloaded movies, but also stream on YouTube, Amazon, Netflix etc. on one device without having to jump between UIs with their various kinks. Very happy with this, because it was free and works better than anything I had before.
This isn't a very creative "repurpose" like many of the others however... I have purchased a few Surface Pro tablets off eBay with badly broken (read completely shattered) screens and bent frames. Seems that once Surface Pros have bad screen and chassis damage their price plummets even though the internals are often fine. One of these is my workbench computer in my shop. The tablet hangs on the wall with a thift store monitor and wireless KB plugged in. Excellent performing computer on the cheap. Another runs as a Plex media server and I just remote desktop into it.
The OUYA API server was shut down mid 2019 and rendered the gaming consoles useless.
I reverse engineered the API, documented it and built a re-implementation that makes the OUYAs fully working again: http://ouya.cweiske.de/
I use an old laptop (single core, 1g ram) as a remote desktop client. Since I work regularly in two different locations this allowed me to buy only one workstation which I keep at one location and that old laptop allows me to use it from the other one. TBH I initialy did it as a fun project/experiment but was amazed how well it worked[0] and stayed with it.
[0]That being said both locations have a fibre and the distance between them is below 20 miles so neither bandwidth nor response times cause any issues
I find it amazing what you can do with old gear. Phones I've used for bluetooth update stations, where a bit of code can read sensors and send emails with the readings (on WiFi). Or small 'stick up' displays where you use the web page widget in Android and just re-read the same web page over and over again.
I used a number of laptops as servers because of the built in battery backup. Less useful when they don't have on board ethernet since USB ethernet can be flakey. Opening them up to disconnect the display backlight insures they don't try to run themselves down by turning on the screen.
I've given away a number of machines to young people who wanted to learn programming and computers but their parents both wouldn't trust them with the "family" computer and they likely could not afford (or know how) to get a free one. Back before WeirdStuff closed in the Bay Area I had an after school activity that would be to take a few students to there and build a machine out of parts, limit $20. Put together some really interesting machines that we would install Linux on and be off and running.
Also have salvaged parts to make things, like PC power supplies to make a benchtop power supply.
I had an old laptop with a broken hinge. I ended up flipping the screen all the way around, velcroing it to the keyboard side, loading a bunch of personal pictures into a slide show screen saver and then mounted it on the wall in a picture frame.
I have an old iPhone with an app that uses the camera to watch for motion. If something happens, it takes a bunch of still pictures and stitches them together into a herky-jerky video and stores it for later.
I keep it on top of the kitchen cabinet to make sure the lady I pay to feed and play with my cats when I'm away does both things. So far, so good. It's hard to get people to actually play with pets when you're away, no matter how much you pay them.
I think the app is called "GorillaCam." I don't think it's on the app store anymore. But it reminds me that when the iPhone first came out, it didn't have the horsepower to do video. But not too long after the App Store came out there were third-party apps that would use the phone's still camera to make poor quality videos.
I repurposed my old Intel Atom powered netbook to be an Emacs server. Until recently, it sat in a corner and would have a half dozen emacs session running screen. Every time I want to resume work on given project from any desktop or laptop in my office or when I'm travelling. I simply open a remote X11 emacs window on the machine, and viola! my entire development sesion is available to me exactly where I left off. Tools used: Emacs, X11 (for windows, mac, and Linux) Emacs tramp, and ssh, putty, and screen. For access from outside my network OpenVPN and Viscosity VPN client on Mac and Windows. Last week I replaced the atom machine with an Raspberry Pi 2.
I used an old Kindle as an Information display in my home server (no typo) for my home server. I provided a write-up over at the Unraid forum [1].
tl;dr: It got rooted, and was reprogrammed to fetch an image from a local server running on Unraid. As I didn't know how to elegantly create an image from live data, I opted for a svg template. I placed placeholder texts in this svg, and then did a simple search & replace. With each update, I stored a copy of the template as the "live" version, and then used Imagemagick to convert the SVG to a format the Kindle would understand.
It was a nice project, but got replaced with a Grafana dashboard later last year. :)
[1]: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/75710-meet-zeus/
Reusing an old tablet to control the X32 Mixer at church, also using it with a Arduino in a stompbox that emulates a keyboard, to turn pages on my sheet music when playing guitar and both my hands are occupied.
I'm working on web forum/community software which should be compatible with just about any Web-capable device, regardless of browser.
I've dedicated a lot of time to compatibility, and now it is usable and fully feature-accessible in IE4, IE5.5, IE8, Netscape 3, 4, Opera 3-12, Lynx, w3m, Chrome 1.0, old Safari versions, etc.
I'm still working on a few IE3 issues, will be fixed soon.
It's always good to have an old device on hand for performance testing. It's easier to discover performance issues on a slow machine, as you get to experience the lag first hand.
I don't know if this counts as a Project, but a friend of mine is still using her black plastic MacBook[0] interfaced to a ton of audio gear.
I don't know if she uses it for anything other than audio, but she's a musician so I think that part is used pretty seriously.
[0]: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook_2.0...
Not very creative: I use my older phone to read books in the hot tub. This way, if I drop it, I don't loose my fancy new expensive phone.
It tells the weather forecast and time for the next few days and at night it goes into 'dark mode' which is nice, have it in a corner in my living room.
Edit: forgot to mention that if you use it, remember to do the 'Add to Homescreen' so it displays in full screen.
I've repurposed a couple old iPhones and a 2nd Gen iPad as baby monitors using the aptly-named Baby Monitor app (no affiliation other than being a satisfied customer). One sits in the kid's room as the mic/camera and the others serve as the speakers/display. The app is fantastic as it works on essentially any version of iOS and any iOS device. The iPad chokes on any website and barely runs anything else, but works perfectly with the Baby Monitor app.
I wish more apps like this worked on older versions of iOS or Android. No need to hack around with some alternative OS (not that there's anything wrong with that) - it's usable by any non-techie with some old iOS devices.
Using an old desktop my dad gave me to spin up some websites getting 1,000,000+ unique visitors monthly. It has some basic specs: 12gb RAM and 8 cores from a decade or so ago.
Was using Raspberry Pis before, but given that many Docker containers don't support ARMv7, I'm just utilizing the luxury of AMD64 (and using Docker Compose, Traefik, and Wireguard to do scaling and networking).
Now I can do my coding using VSCode, except I can do it from any computer that has a browser (although Chrome seems to work the best).
I highly recommend checking out CodeServer (no affiliation)
I use an old Android smartphone as a replacement wifi antenna for the notebook I use plugged to my 65 inch TV. It's my main workstation, and is a very good machine, but for some reason there's a short circuit on the motherboard and the wifi antenna does not work. This same old phone is also used as a security camera so I can see my pets remotely when I'm traveling. I use the app Alfred to do that, and it works very well.
Old phones make for rather good CCTV/surveillance cameras. Anything made in the past 4-6 years will have great picture quality (during the day, mostly), Internet connectivity, alarm features, motion sensing, even object recognition.
I spend a lot of time in the backcountry trekking, hiking, snowshoeing, and canoeing.
Over the last couple years I have increasingly started using my iPhone for navigation using GaiaGPS and Avenza PDF Maps.
My old phone, though unpowered for day to day life still functions great for navigation. On long trips I’ll bring this second phone as a backup map/gps which is smaller and lighter than the equivalent paper maps and navigation tools.
I've built a good ol' web app which runs in fullscreen mode on an old iPad 1, turning it into a "smart" picture frame. Runs on top of Trello, with a small backend in Go for caching and proxying. Works great.
I use an old laptop to backup data I save in Google Drive, in case my account becomes inaccessible someday.
You can contribute to the effort to port https://postmarketos.org/ to old phones and help unify hardware support in the mainline kernel.
I put an Apple 4x PCIe AHCI SSD, a Radeon R9 280X, 2 additional SATA SSDs, and a USB 3 card into a 2006 Mac Pro with dual quadcores and 32GB RAM. In doing so, I converted it into a useful computer-cum-space-heater that handles almost any modern workload I can throw at it, except for things requiring AVX extensions that the CPUs don't support.
edit: even games! Even moderately-recent ones!
I have a very old netbook running FreeDOS. I have installed nothing but nano on it, and I use it as a distraction-free writing device. I also have a black MacBook running Xubuntu, and it works great. Got a new, non-matching battery for it for about CDN$60, and I get three or four hours of use on a charge. Only issue is the wifi is sometimes flakey on newer routers.
I took out my old OnePlus phone and I've built my own baby monitor app. We use it with our 5mo and it's been super useful for us so I polished it and a few days ago released it in Play Store so other parents can try it.
The app has some cool and unique features:
- pink noise to help our baby fall asleep faster and sleep longer
- works in the background
- auto-reconnect
- low baby monitor battery warning
If someone is interested, the app is in the play store here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zzzbabymon...Initially, there are 4 hours of free monitoring time, but as the app is new I'm happy to give promo codes with extra time. Just drop me a message (contact info is the app) and I'll send you one.
I'm working on a software stack that would let you plug a hard drive into an old Android phone and access the files over the cloud in a Google Drive type fashion. My patchbay[0] service is a step in that direction.
[0] https://patchbay.pub
I replaced my roku stick with an old laptop and bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it was great having a super fast and responsive smart tv. Ultimately I replaced it with a $20 chromecast which is just as capable but with better ux.
Im using an ex corporate hp dl380e server for my home lab, loads of computing power for dirt cheap because there is no SLA.
The server was cheap but the electricity is not, and while its powerful I could get a modern quad core would be as powerful and use less electricity for about the same cost over three years.
A lot of this stuff is e-waste not because its no longer powerful but because it is no longer economically viable. A lot of e-waste, phones in particular go to Africa to be reused, outside of this I don't see any reuse / recycling thats realistic.
Saw a lot of great videos on YouTube about turning old laptop screens into standalone HDMI monitors (with a simple $12 board). That now explains the the stack of taken-apart laptops in the flat where I've been unable to get them to release the screen...
I have an ipad mini 1 that I keep wanting to leave plugged into the stereo to use for music but its version of Music is too old to access the copies of my stuff in the cloud and trying to update the OS just spins forever. This post made me decide to look into it and discover this is because it was jailbroken, and that blocks Software Update from working, so I've plugged it into the computer and am updating it from there.
Dunno if it'll actually end up working, right now I'm doing a backup and iTunes is saying it's "over capacity by 634 MB" and pinwheeling, but at least it's an attempt.
edit, an hour later: IT WORKS YAY, thanks for giving me a reason to fool with it.
I use ancient Atom processor laptops to run our home automation servers. Minimal power consumption, built-in battery backups, WOL/power, extremely reliable, $40 on eBay.
I have an old hand-me-down laptop from a relative. It's from 2011 and is a Core i5. The screen is terrible, but otherwise it's perfectly capable.
I couldn't call it a "project," but I've installed a music player (Rhythmbox, but pick whatever software you like) and hooked it up to some premium speakers. It's the best music player I could hope for -- it can play literally any format, doesn't phone home, and uses very little energy.
I took an old tablet, stuck it to the wall above my desk with 3M's Command picture hanging doodads, and now have an always-on display of my kanban board: https://kanbanflow.com/
It's great to have a permanent visible reminder of what I intended to be doing. I used to do that with sticky notes, but that had the big disadvantage of not being visible except right at my desk.
I use a spare TV like a kiosk panel for the family calendar, weather, and various RSS feeds.
Here is interesting DIY video of things one can create from an old laptop. Inside the video there is a link to creating a daylight lamp/panel from a monitor -- it's really great and looks like a daylight from a window due to specific materials used in monitors to evenly distribute light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLP_L7Mgz6M
If you have an old router with USB 2.0 ports lying around it's fairly straightforward to install OpenWRT and Zerotier and make a VPN with a private cloud attached if you mount a HDD, and as long as your file transfer requirements aren't too intense. Have one running on my LAN and it works well for FTP, SMB shares for backup, and normal VPN stuff. Plus, it doesn't consume much power as it's MIPS chipset.
I don't think this is exactly what you're looking for, but my favorite repurposing of old devices was when I was looking for something to do with the eight Kaypro IIs I had kicking around about 15 years ago.
What I ended up doing was chaining them together to use as a single multiprocessor PC. Those 8, working together, came very close to reaching the same performance as a low-end "modern" PC of the time.
I use an old Android phone as a dedicated Kodi remote for a media center PC and my old Nexus 7 is pretty much exclusively for reading Jojo's manga.
Just until recently I was usging an old Nokia N85 for my running sessions. It had dedicated physical buttons for playback, skip song, volume etc, the "Nokia Sports tracker app" also suported polar heart rate monitor.
Some years ago it stop supporting direct upload of workouts and I had to send the gpx file via bluetooth.
Last year battery died and I haven't found cheap replacements.
I have an iBook G3 that i use to monitor a server and make announcements about current workload, logins , lockouts and database health.
My friend had a raspberry pi2, which he didnt want because of lack of bt and wifi, that is my plex server now.
My stack of old laptops and computers is repurposed into a franken-cluster running various OpenStack services and testing applications on different platforms and performance profiles. Also handy for testing dweb applications and ideas.
Would be interesting to find a way to flash old dumbphones for something.
Great platforms for CTF or pen-testing practice if that is something you enjoy. I have a few raspberry pis and old phones that I test out new tools and methods on. If something breaks or something I install looks questionable I can factory reset them (the phones) and its no big deal.
Old laptop + USB docks + old hdds made for a pretty respectable home server. Especially since it was a gaming laptop so only the gfx was proper old
...struggling to work out what to do now though as the next generation of laptops needs to retire. Might try donating but I'm not optimistic
I have a Thinkpad T42p, that I don't use anymore. I wonder how hard would it be to gut it and with a small SBC like Pine64's Rock64 and some additional board make it useful again. Question is how to drive: LVDS display, keyboard, touchpad and trackpoint?
I use a bad Xiaomi Mi A2 for watching preloaded vids during commute, and playing OpenMW !
It was my partner's former phone but she eventually broke the camera, and it was quite sluggish.
However, it has a big screen, a big battery life, and had cost me 150€ anyway.
Low-hanging fruit, not particularly hacky, but really nice: Android phone on guitar pedalboard. Metronome, tuner, backing track jukebox, etc. I run the headphone jack into a Boss looper pedal. Very handy to have a dedicated android in the effect loop.
Old Android phone has LineageOS on it and acts as a remote for my TV and Chromecast.
I use my 6 year old OnePlus One as a smart phone.
It runs LineageOS just fine and I can barely tell it from a new phone. The drawback is the camera is not as good as current flagships but I can live with that as photos are still pretty good.
Idea: kids go house to house fund raising by collecting old phones plus $10 per phone (ewaste). They factory reset and load with kid friendly apps and sell to Moms via cheepfone.com. Raise money for school tech clubs.
I use batocera linux in my old desktop for a very capable retro-games machine. It's a little bulkier than the tipical Raspberry Pi + retropie installation, but beats it's performance and comes for free.
We created Viyo.io for this very purpose. With all of the ridiculousness around security system privacy right now, we wanted to build a web-based, privacy-first solution because it's something that we wanted but couldn't find. Basically you can use almost any web-accessible device as a security camera, or to observe your cameras. We've had a super awesome response so far, and we've been able to add a ton of backwards compatibility. Some of our users are using 7+ year old Android devices.
Reminded me of using an old Nokia N900 to watch EdX videos offline while commuting. No cellular, just Using WiFi.
Loved this little Nokia because Maemo OS was Linux-based, had a keyboard and terminal.
I’m using an old Asus netbook as a home server. I installed Xubuntu and now I use it as a Docker host for Plex, a torrent server, and other projects. It works surprisingly well!
Run BOINC(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a distributed, high throughout computing initiative that runs with volunteer computing. It helps solve cutting edge research problems in science.
It is easy to set up (just screate an account with scienceunited.org) and great to contribute to. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and Android!
Link: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
I set up an old iPad as a picture frame that shuffles through all my photos. It's been wonderful reliving memories and vacations! I did have to buy a third party app to do the shuffle since Apple removed it a few OS versions ago though.
Q: are there any uses for old Core 2 desktops without onboard GPU that consume ~200W when idle?
I'm wondering if I should just trash my old desktop, especially if it'll be cheaper in the long term to get something more power-efficient.
I use an old Ipad (retina screen) with Dakboard free edition stuck to the refrigerator as a family calendar and photo frame. It works really well with open weather and google photos, google calendar integration.
My laptop broke at the hinge; now I have two parts. I wanted to convert the screen into a touchscreen for a while now. Not sure what I am going to do with that, tho. Maybe hook it to a Raspi?
I have about 30 Android smartphones I am using for volunteer distributed computing (BOINC). Most are running Android 4.x
I made blurb.cloud so that an old phone or tablet could serve as a shared billboard.
I turned a Surface 3 (non-pro) into a wall clock that displays the current weather.
use an old laptop to run the opensimulator 3d world server (open source second life)
shadow.tech lets me run a Windows 10 gaming spec desktop on all my old devices.
Use old speakers and cellphone to generate random noise to annoy your noisy neighbors