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Anyone planning hosting business using old Mobiles?
it was fun to see there's a hosting using RPIs.. many old mobiles are way more powerful than RPIs and competitively so with many an older and even mid-tier xeon (1 cpu VS 1 cpu). anyone here working on such a project? could just put up a rack right at home..
probably don't even need to invest in mobiles, - everyone's easily got a dozen or so stashed in the desk somewhere.. i personally think it's a waste to get measly $40 discount on new phone by trading in the previous model that's still working great and has a scratch somewhere or whatnot..
https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones/
Comments
Good luck
They are unsafe to keep plugged in 24/7 for months with the battery still inside, and in modern ones it would be a hassle to remove, and regardless, they are not designed to even turn on without one, so it would need some schematic hacks and soldering.
At which point a question arises, are you really saving money, when each single phone needs so much work on it to be usable in this scenario.
Further, everything is locked down and boots Android only. Even if you manage to set up a chroot, the kernel still can't be replaced and has so many limitations. Maybe you can run some of your own tasks and services on it, but selling anything like that to customers is out of the question.
Yup - in the Google project they're removing the batteries because it would be a huge fire hazard in a data center.
You can sell your old phone, e.g., on Swappa instead.
It comes to mind, now that EU mandates replaceable batteries, they should have also mandated that a phone turns on and works without a battery, with the charger connected. But probably too clueless for that. Meanwhile it would be really dead simple to implement for vendors, I had an old tablet which was able to work like that simply from the factory.
it's just a hypothetical. not only i am not planning to do this myself, i simply wouldn't know where to start.. well, start with the article.. ok, i know where to start.. but then i wouldn't know where to continue. this is just an entertaining idea, nothing else.