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Reusing old android smartphone as server for low-end market?
Every year mobile phone brands release their new flagship device and we then dump our old phones. Can we reuse these for hosting personal websites/low-end market? Currently few brands provide Raspberry PI (arm64) server and Oracle, Hetzner and other brands provide ARM servers. These servers are cheaper to build, uses less energy, takes less space.
So I was thinking if we could reuse our old smartphones hosting servers. Will you use these server for your production/hobby sites?
https://www.linaro.org/blog/let-s-boot-the-mainline-linux-kernel-on-qualcomm-devices/
Comments
lol
I used an old Android phone (shattered screen, etc) to run CREDO cosmic ray detector for several months plugged in, until the battery became as large as an grape and burned down the house.
Using twitter in light mode? Wakanda monster are you
Hetzner used to sell Samsung Exynos CPU-based "servers":
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-information/root-server-hardware/
AX10 Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa Core 2 GB LPDDR3 32 GB MicroSD
AX20 Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa Core 2 GB LPDDR3 64 GB eMMC
AX30 Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa Core 2 GB LPDDR3 32 GB MicroSD + 3 TB HDD (USB3)
This is the same chip used in the Samsung S5 (international).
This used to be their AX lineup before Ryzen
Battery is the main issue for old phones. They are not meant to be constantly on charge and I'm not sure how many support current passthrough. If you manage to remove the battery and it turns on then it should be fine, thermals won't be great but at least you don't have a possible 💣 threat in your house. I was toying around the idea of using my old phone as a tailscale exit node at home but haven't gotten around removing the battery yet.
Removing the battery looks possible.
Many phones won't boot if the battery is absent.
PinePhone can start without battery but there would be no WiFi or LTE.
It may be possible to pretend there's a battery by connecting your power supply to the battery port instead of the charging port.
If you want to use a phone without battery depending on model you might be able to simply connect power supply to battery port but if it didn't work you can emulate a battery connector.
For 3 pin connectors a simple schematic like this can work : https://www.electroschematics.com/mobile-phone-battery-emulator/
Also BTemp pin in 4 pin connectors is not important and most phones will run without it being connected.
One option to minimise the risk is to have a timer on the power supply: an hour on, a few hours off.
Or if you have an app to log battery %, a smart plug, and the right plumbing to connect the two: when battery % hits ~90 turn off the power until it drops to ~50, turn back on again until it hits ~90, loop.
Though given the time it might take to set this up, unless you are doing this as a learning/fun/both exercise you might just be better off buying a cheap SBC. Unfortunately that might take some shopping, R-Pi's are not easy to get hold of inexpensively ATM – I bought a 4B for £35 in 2019, the cheapest 4x I can see ATM without having to wait up to a month for delivery is £154 (if willing to wait a month you can get a 4Gb starter kit (board, case, PSU) for £87). If not an R-Pi then you need to check hardware support & compatibility (do you need a custom kernel patch that the manufacturer won't maintain after a few months ete.).
You don't even need external circuitry, you can do it inside the phone itself as long as you can interact with the PMIC, ref: acc/AccA.
@MeAtExampleDotCom said:
"when battery % hits ~90 turn off the power until it drops to ~50, turn back on again until it hits ~90, loop"
Li-ion cells in some phones are charged up to as high as 4.35 volts or so, which gives the most talk time. But charging to that kind of voltage all the time can considerably reduce battery life.
Several times longer battery life is possible by charging more frequently but to more conservative voltages -- for example, charging to about 3.9v and discharging to about 3.6v. This gives only about half the talk time, but minimizes battery degradation, if you care about that.
My Pixel phone says 3.9 volts is about 52% charge, and 3.6 volts is about 2% charge. This gives me only half the talk time, which might be a non-starter for many people. But it's fine with me because I don't live glued to my phone all the time.
See, for example, this explanation:
https://www.powerstream.com/lithium-ion-charge-voltage.htm