Hi, everyone!
I have an old ASUS Zenfone Max Pro M2 laying around getting some dust, and have no idea what interesting things could be done with/to it. Well, its display is broken and it’s impossible to use it conventionally due to ghost touch, but a fix for this is to mirror its screen onto my computer using scrcpy.
I searched the web to find some ideas on which uses I could give to it, but none sounded good. I was thinking about turning it into a self-hosted file storage or something of the like. Is it possible to do so on with a phone? I’d love to hear from you guys about this or any other suggestion you have!
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During the pandemic, I actually did a couple projects with old, broken phones for fun.
One was, I ran Kubernetes on them. Why? I was on lockdown and bored and lonely. Another was, my son and I experimented with using them as robot controllers, instead of RasPis. We sort of got this to work.
Running Ubuntu Touch because Linux lol
RetroArch gaming console “we have a DS at home”
Lineage OS?
owotrack VR fbt tracker?
Love how the ubuntu touch website has the Nexus 5 as a featured phone. Was probably my all time favourite phone… also it’s about 10 years old.
I’ve still got a Nexus One floating around somewhere!
You could turn it into a Pihole or AdGuard.
Turning it into a NAS would be limited by how much storage it has, so it could just be a fun project to do for the purpose of doing it.
Both ideas are genuinely good, thank you!
It indeed has a short storage (64GB; ~50GB available for the user), but I probably wouldn’t use to store anything very large. Would you mind to explain what tools I should use to do that?
Either option, ad blocker or NAS, has far better tutorials in YouTube or various sites that can explain everything better than I can.
I do have some concerns about viability due to the screen issue. You may find that you get so far as initial setup after first boot and find yourself unable to progress. You would have output, but trying to have WiFi setup to telnet in could be a bit of a bother and you may have to use a wired keyboard via an adapter to get anywhere.
There are some apps that allow you to use your phone as a webcam, either via USB or wifi.
Does the camera still work? Could do some time lapse stuff with it.
If you are “forced” to use WhatsApp because many of your contacts are using it, you could use it to run WhatsApp and set-up a bridge to Matrix: https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html?bridge=whatsapp
Folding@home
Boinc
I’m in the process of trying to make some old phones work on Linux mobile and truly check what is the state of things there (considering they have been reverse-engineered to work there, not ideal).
Hi, guys,
I apologize for not answering everyone, but all the ideas you all gave me (apart from sliding it into a body of water, loool) were amazing. I’ll probably not stop doing experiments with this phone even if I’m able to do what I first aimed to (the self-hosted storage), which will give me the chance to try out some of your suggestions. Truly appreciation for all the cool, interesting things you all came up with. Bless!
See how many times you can skip it on a lake.
I bet you throw garbage out of your car too
About as often as I skip electronics on bodies of water.
If you do home automation you could hook it up to a cable permanently and use it as a Home Assistant dashboard. My brother in law used an old tablet for this.
If you have a 3d printer you could use it for octoprint instead of a raspberry pi
Recycle it.
It’s called "reduce, reuse, recycle’. OP is asking about step two.
This
