Forget About Raspberry Pi! Use Your Old Phone Instead. (Really???)

You don't need a Raspberry Pi any more! Re-use an obsolete mobile phone in electronics projects and program it like an Arduino.

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00:00 - Introduction
00:28 - Dissecting a mobile phone
01:17 - FT232 adapter boards
01:42 - Wiring the module
02:26 - PCBWay
03:07 - Android App programming
04:51 - Android UI
05:27 - Running the app
06:32 - Power supply
08:22 - Digital inputs

[arturbieniek]

I've been using mobile phones for years as web servers, wifi routers, for running computations, downloading torrents. The funny thing is the raspberry pi costs like 50+$ and has nothing more but a 4x1.5GHz CPU, max 4GB of ram and wifi+bt. For that price you can actually buy a slightly damaged s8-10 phone that bas a huge battery, 4G modem, 8 core CPU, 4-8GB RAM, lots of drive space and many more. It also uses a lot less power on standby.

[firstlast]

Smartphones have: accelerometer, gyroscope, which can be used as a horizon level or motion sensor, thermometer, camera, microphone, compass, gps, light sensor, fingerprint scanner, retina scanner (in Samsung), NFC reader, fm radio in some models, Internet access (online radio, weather forecast, transfer of files to the server, for example, video from a surveillance camera, etc), barometer, SD-card, SIM-card and other features.

[KaptanUfuk]

Probably my old phone is faster than a raspberry. And it is impossible to find a 4G/5G sim module for microcontrollers but we can use our old mobile phones. This is awesome.

[randomuser]

Using perf board kind of genius actually, i never thinking of that before.Thanks for the tips.

[lagmonster]

Lovely demonstrator project, this would be perfect for turning an old phone into a wireless security camera that could operate a pan/tilt mount 😁

[michaelchristianrusso]

Caveat is that sometimes phones behave strangely when you supply constant voltage to the battery pins, since they seem to expect voltage to go higher or lower over time as the battery exhausts itself. I think I've seen that some models of phone will strangely report the "battery's charge" declines until it hits 0 and then shut down. Depends on the model of phone; sometimes it might expect there to be a thermistor there, or BSI, or who knows what. Sometimes you might have to try and harvest an old battery's charge/control board and solder your power input to that as an intermediary, so that the phone at least thinks a proper battery is indeed inserted.

[Victoare]

You can attach a simple arduino board the same way and communicate it through serial connection. It will expand wastly the IO ports and you can use the phones camera and muscle to do harder stuffs.

Also there is firmata. A library to arduino which allows you to "remotely" (using serial comms) configure and control the pins. With it you don't need to write separate code to the arduino each time you modify something in your code in the phone regardles if you want to use more ports.

[therealchriscunningham]

My Galaxy S4 was one of my favourite phones ever precisely because it was so easy to disassemble. I woke up one morning to discover I'd tipped a glass of water over it in the night and fried and USB port. Five minutes on eBay to source a replacement (whose postage was more expensive than the board) and I was back up and running twenty minutes after it arrived. Strongly suspect that my next phone will be one that promotes this sort of sustainability over being 3% lighter or whatever.

[AmateurEngineer-luym]

I did a similar project were i used the display of the phone and some photoresistors to control a rc car. Right now i have 10 old smartphones lying around waiting to be used.

[tripleaaa]

Now i can turn my old phone into a drone computer

[Normy]

Old phones were worthless before this video

[josebenjamincarbajalorozco]

This ins one of the most amazing way of using old phones! Congrads!

[veranet]

People don't usually recognize that phones are fully fledged computers.

[ugurunver]

This is the concept i have always wondered if it would be possible. Thank you Doc.

[rudiaspeling]

Great idea for old phones lying around.

[Krzys]

Android is in full control of the hardware, meaning it will force your application to stop at random weird moments, that's why it can't be used for anyting reliable. Imagine you have built a drone using old android phone, you have evrything, hd camera, gps, lte, gyro, lot of ram, space and cpu power, just that your drone might just stop responding because android will just kill the app that controls it. That's the problem.

[MetalheadAndNerd]

Crazy to see that Android Studio still supports Android 3. This is unthinkable in the Microsoft world.

[hk-four-sixteen]

this is because android phones and rasp PI's share a common foundation called linux kernel. The android OS is a modified linux kernel, while the rasp pi OS is also a modified Debian distro.

[johnaraydimaunahan]

Thank you for this video, you gave me an idea what to use for my old Android 6 mobile phones.

Watching from Manila PHILIPPINES

Mabuhay!

[ara]

Your idea is great. I want to share my idea with you. We all know that bluetooth headphones have a very small receiver. It is convenient for all sorts of crafts, robots, and toys. It has a battery and a charge controller on board. If we make an application that will encode commands into sound of a certain frequency and transmit via bluetooth, and on the receiver side we put an arduino that receives the sound and decodes it into commands, then we can make a universal platform for controlling toys and gadgets. We get rid of problems with switching android - arduino. And the sketch for arduino will be a few lines. How do you like the idea?