I found a few old phones from my family. II cleaned them, installed LineageOS and rooted most of them. On one I installed postmarketOS, one is still stock Android and one is lets say bricked (after installing lineagesos it stay on boot logo for ever, before that I installed lineageos and nethunter on it). One one disk encryption doesnt work for some reason.
Phones (all samsung galaxy):
- S4
- A5
- A5 (bricked)
- A5 (postmarketOS)
- J3
- J4+ (no encryption)
- A31 (stock)
What can I do with them? Something like Monero node or Tor relay, but I’m already running that on old pc. For something that needs speed I have rpis (like a website). Camera security system? Tracking device?
Is it possible to run (and autorun) cli apps and/or services that can access interent, bluetooth, gps, sensors, camera, files, etc. just like on linux? I’m a programmer and I don’t like making normal android apps for a simple project.
My main concern of using a phone as a server is the battery. It’ll get spicy after a year of constantly being plugged in, and the phone usually doesn’t work without a battery attached.
If your old phone has a removable battery, you can sometimes replace them with an appropriate capacitor.
That will eliminate spicy pillows from the mix but also eliminate battery backup, so if your power goes out you will need to manually turn them back on.