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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

I'm buying up broken screen old Android smartphone instead.

For example I got several broken screen Huawei P20s from 2018, they were 10€ each. 128GB storage with 4GB RAM https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p20-9107.php

They boot up, you can install termux and then whatever is your choice of Linux software. I run several copyparty instances for friends and family

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.termux/

https://github.com/9001/copyparty

The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.

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>Huawei P20

>The only thing I'm not a big fan of is the charging. Non-removable battery, already 8 or so years old, obviously the phone needs power to work. So I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard.

My family (n=3) owned the Huawei P20 Pro (acquired at the same time in the same promo, perhaps the same batch?). This product line seems to have serious issues with battery swelling. Each phone had spicy pillows at some point within 2 years of ownership. Even outside the warranty period, Huawei was willing to replace the battery at their cost, at their contracted Toronto repair centre. Each of the repaired phones had their spicy pillows return within 6-9 months. Huawei was still willing to repair the phones, but at that point I'd rather have recycled it. I strongly suspect Huawei was avoiding doing a voluntary recall and triaging it through their RMA process, given how little resistance their customer support put up (they immediately sent back an RMA label without requiring any pictures).

FWIW I have a P30 Pro that I used for 5 years without a hitch, and still sits fully functioning in a box serving as a backup in case my current phone gets damaged. So that generation likely did not have the same issue.

Android TV boxes are also great.

Slightly more expensive but you won't have to deal with battery health and the new ones come with a 1GB NIC and USB 3 ports!

I've always had bad luck with those. They very quickly start running poorly, maybe because the flash worn out.

they're often packed with malware https://www.androidauthority.com/android-tv-box-maker-google...

why does it matter if you nuke the os and reinstall?

... and they're locked down. Aren't they? What box would you recommend?

There's enough exploits these days, the only advantage of most of these things running on many years old BSPs

If you’re in the U.S - look into Walmart’s ONN boxes. They’re cheap and have great performance. Specifically the ONN 4k pro. They’re not even bloated with apps. The apps that are installed can easily be removed. In addition, easy to side load apps and customize.

The X96 Max Plus has excellent Linux support (S905X3, 4 core A53 @ 1.9 GHz, decent GPU), 1GB NIC, 4GB memory 1X USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0. It's what I'm eyeing at the moment.

They currently go for ~60 USD which steep compared to the pre-ram crisis prices but nothing crazy.

For comparison sake, you can find a few really high-end routers that are faster but most are a lot less powerful than this.

The CPU/GPU actually allows you to emulate a fair amount, up to N64, PSP and Dreamcast (but definitely with some compromise) so they function great as retroboxes as well.

They sip power and run great as a small homeserver. You can even use them as a NAS for media (that you're willing to lose since you won't be running any form of RAID with 1 USB 3.0 port).

I did the opposite. I built an x86 version of Android TV because typical ARM Android TV boxes are underpowered garbage and the locked bootloaders prevent replacement of the OS. My x86 build on a NUC just flies and is 100% under my control without Google or OEM crapware.

To add onto this for others.

There is Android TalkBack (for poor vision) which is available on first boot/factory reset that narrates the menu. Even with a completely broken screen you can get ADB set up.

That's very creative actually. Might be quite dated but most of the workarounds I've heard of involve plugging in a OTG cable that supports display-out and a mouse.

Doesn't Android have rather aggressive battery saving features which kill processes and put the phone to sleep after so long of being idle? Is there an easy way around that?

The battery is a free built-in UPS and isn't a fire hazard unless the charging electronics were designed spectacularly poorly. The BMS knows to stop charging the battery when it's full. All of these phones probably use the same set of well-known BMS chips, I would imagine.

Was considering doing the same until I found a couple old pine64 on eBay for ~$25 (2016, 4 core allwinner CPU, 2gb ddr3)

Sometimes there are pretty good deals on laptops, especially off lease. I've seen some $400-500 w/ 32GB RAM pop up on Slickdeals every few months.

You can get plenty of mini PCs, used computers and used phones in that price range. They aren’t a substitute for owning a raspberry pi though.

are you running an EOL OS with an unpatchable kernel? phones have a lot of limitations as general purpose computers

How are you getting GPIO?

Most likely he doesn't use GPIO, if it's just a tailscale/pi-hole client or something like that.

If you REALLY need GPIO then just add a USB-C OTG MCU board like a ESP32, or even the ancient Arduino Uno works as USB GPIO via serial TTY on Android.

Or just use a ESP32 by itself, if you don't need a full Linux OS, just to toggle some GPIO pins via the internet.

Possibilities are endless. Just use your imagination, or ask some LLM.

How to control the gpio?

Several methods. You can run a MQTT server, Lightweight HTTP Server or even just serial over USB. Literally the world is your oyster. Extra special points if you do HTTP over ethernet

Flash the MCU with a program that takes a text protocol over the UART from the host and uses it to control its GPIOs

Use something like this:

Adafruit FT232H Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO, SPI, I2C https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

(or even more cheaply a CH347T board which are dirt cheap on Aliexpress)

Both have decent Python support.

There are many issues, first termux doesn’t have all packages and struggle to run some common ones. You have pages and pages of workaround in their GitHub.

Secondly, using a device on a battery to run 24/24 is nonsense, you are Puting a lot of work on the battery by constantly getting it at 100% and eventually it will break and with it your data.

Thirdly, these devices have just a usb port. Sometimes usb 2.0. What you gonna do when the 128gb is filled up ?

Use an LLM to adapt your dependencies to the environment, cap the charge at 80%, and set up wifi.

How did you get into the phones with broken screen?

The screen glass is cracked but you can still read what's on the display to root it.

That reminds me how I once dropped my phone into a vat of industrial solvent; not for very long, but enough for just a drop or so to enter via the charging port. The substance gradually separated layers of the screen. Touch worked, but the big black blob in the OLED eventually overtook the entire screen. Before it went completely dark, I enabled screenshot upload (aside from camera roll) to Dropbox. Then it was just a matter of taking screenshots and measured taps to turn the phone into a very fine GSM modem/wi-fi router as I looked into getting another phone.

Rooting with a completely melted screen would be a little harder, but hey, maybe rooting could be done by following the instructions step-by-step with a little faith, and then post-root the USB might work with an external portable monitor? I'm sure it's a solvable problem.

You can also try plugging in an external monitor via USB-C. On some phones it'll just work out of the box. You can even use a mouse and keyboard.

Or buy used laptops with defects like broken screen or keyboard from FB marketplace.

Not in my area at least. People gut the RAM from them now to sell separately for profit, and often the HDD too for privacy, so you're basically buying a paper weight that's a motherboard in a shell.

There's laptops or X86 tablets with soldered RAM but those are rare and vanish immediately if they show up at a good price.

this is the way. samsung dex is pretty awesome to turn them into pseudo desktop computers.

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