- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Really makes you wonder how much e-waste could be avoided if phones were required to have unlockable bootloaders. Open source hardware drivers would be the next hurdle, but at least the door would be open.
Sure, not everyone’s gonna turn their old phone into a dev board, but there would be a huge secondhand market for them rather than the small number that are known to be unlockable.
Imagine the secondary market.
Caveat first: I’m not a hardware guy. I tend to fuck up anything more complex than replacing an m.2 drive.
But if someone was, say, selling a case and components that would turn a Pixel into a mini computer without too much soldering, I’d go for it. I’ve got a couple of Pixels and an Xperia that I never got around to disposing of. They’re all underpowered and incapable of running any modern mobile OS, but I think they’d be fine running a Linux kernel without all of the mobile cruft. Built-in WiFi, powered over USB - heck, even a built-in UPS! Even if the battery is degraded, you’re still looking at a couple of hours, at least, of runtime without mains.
If you could repurpose the display, even better, but honestly with a different OS I could replaced a couple of dedicated minis around the house doing things like acting as streaming music receivers.
See if they are compatible with postmarketOS. Not to take away from your point but it may make your pixels useful to your use case. I’ve also used snapclient on android to use old phones connected to speakers as streaming targets
