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JanOS: Turn your phone into an IoT board (2015)
- tired_star_nrg 3y agoOk this is exactly the type of thing I was looking for. Is there work being done to open up the pool of possible hardware even further?
- johnhenry 3y agoThis does look pretty cool; but this could be revolutionary if the hardware support were to significantly widen.
- haliskerbas 3y agoI always wanted to do this for a security camera it seems like all the hardware is there plus a rechargeable battery.
- mgsouth 3y agoThis appears to be based on Firefox OS (aka "Boot to Gecko" B2G). Unfortunately, that was terminated Sept. 2016 [1]. The links to FOS on the JanOS site (such as "View porting instructions" on the Device List page) no longer work, though there is still a home page on Mozilla [2]. Edit: JanOS project looks to be zombied. The "Read more on our blog" link on the front page returns "Server Not Found". [1] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.fxos/c/FoAwifahNPY/m/Lppm0VHVBAAJ https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.fxos/c/FoAwifahNPY/m... [2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-os
- neilv 3y agoI wonder whether all of the FirefoxOS build dependencies for all those devices have been preserved. (When I built it for a few of those devices, it was layered atop Android, and IIRC the process involved fetching components from various places.)
- fabrice_d 3y agoUnfortunately not. For instance, some devices used repositories that got shut down recently (https://bye.codeaurora.org/ https://bye.codeaurora.org/).
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agohttps://capyloon.org/ https://capyloon.org/ is a living fork of Firefox OS
- wkat4242 3y agoFirefoxOS still lives on as KaiOS for cheap feature phones. So in a way it's still around, just not very relevant for this purpose.
- telecuda 3y agoSuggest appending (2015) to the title unless there’s evidence this is still active?
- danboarder 3y agoI added that, thanks. Are there any newer approaches to using a spare Android phone as an IoT board, as an alternative to finding a Rasberry Pi that is often out of stock? Also I'm looking for breakout boards that make it easy to interface with GPIO pins, I've found a few that can do USB to GPIO on sites like Adafruit, but few review of what is available currently and if it works with recent versions of Android, etc.
- iseanstevens 3y agoThese line up somewhat, I think: https://phonk.app/ https://phonk.app/ https://1-10.github.io/zigsim/getting-started.html#install https://1-10.github.io/zigsim/getting-started.html#install
- weare138 3y agoIt should be required for vendors to unlock the bootloader on hardware devices that have reached EOL. Think of how much e-waste we could reduce if we were able to repurpose hardware we already own instead of it just going into a landfill or worse incinerated which is often the case with e-waste shipped overseas to low income areas for disposal.
- maven29 3y agoWhen Galaxy Upcycling was first announced, it was extremely ambitious. However, the final product was cut down by a lot to make room for the economics. https://www.ifixit.com/News/50450/samsung-galaxy-upcycling-unlocked-smartphone-smarthome-project https://www.ifixit.com/News/50450/samsung-galaxy-upcycling-u... To be honest, it sort of makes sense, why would they want to open themselves upto unlimited brand damage liability from battery fires, while spending untold amount of man hours porting mainline linux onto obsolete platforms they'll never see a cent from anymore - whether it be in other products or through services revenue.
- clnq 3y agoThey should just provide drivers for something like Debian. From there on, people could run web servers, Docker, source control servers, NAS stuff, and so on.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoMost of the time, Android vendors do provide the drivers (yay GPL), but they're so specific to Android or so poor quality that you'd better think twice about using them anywhere else. They're also out of tree patches, so porting them to a newer kernel is a job unto itself
- pabs3 3y agoDebian mostly only distributes mainline Linux kernels, so they should instead contribute to the upstream Linux kernel community.
- dapaby 3y ago
- jacooper 3y agoIf only I can actually run full Linux on the multitude of old phones I have. Its a very affordable k8s cluster!
- cosmojg 3y agoHave you tried PostmarketOS? If your old phones are on this list[1], you absolutely can turn them into a very affordable k8s cluster! [1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/All_devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/All_devices
- iforgotpassword 3y agoFolks who do this: how do you keep the battery from bulging and being a fire hazard after a year being constantly connected to a power outlet? I wanted to do this with an older phone that just two wires going to its battery, so I thought I'd measure the voltage and then just use a step-down converter to supply that same voltage to those two pins. Unfortunately no dice, device can't be fooled to think this is a battery and doesn't even turn on. I also tried just connecting a huge cap instead of a battery, but realized that if it runs empty the board night just assume the battery discharged too much and will refuse charging it. Also it still didn't work when I tried.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago>device can't be fooled to think this is a battery and doesn't even turn on. Depend on the phone, what battery charging and monitoring IC it uses, but the older ones from the Samsung S2 generation, the ones that still had removable battery, could easily be fooled by adding a resistor to the third BSI/BTEMP terminal (the one in the middle).
- iforgotpassword 3y agoI feared that there was a sweet spot for this in the past. The few modern ones where you can still get to the battery have some proprietary connector with a dozen pins where I wouldn't even know where to start. The one I had was some Noname device from China that really only had two wires going to the battery pack, which I've never seen on any other Android device yet, so I was quite positive given the cheapness that my simple trick would work, but alas.
- bborud 3y agoFunny this project should turn up now. This project started with a container full of phones our company couldn't get rid of and the question "could we do something useful with them". The short version: not really. Phones consume huge amounts of energy and have tiny batteries relative to their power usage. If you want to repurpose them this isn't the way to do it. Jan, who so modestly (ahem) named this bonsai'd Firefox OS after himself, has since done a lot of interesting things with LoRa and now machine learning. You can find him at http://janjongboom.com/ http://janjongboom.com/.
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- Szpadel 3y agoI really wanted to repurpose my old phone as a security camera , but android power management and lack of sensible way to automatically restart the app for an IP camera made it not very practical. this could be a promising project but device support looks very lacking at this moment. I also considered postmarketos but AFAIR for my particular phone it didn't support the camera, so I stuck with rooted android with some hacks to slow/pause battery charging (it is holding about 5min anyways)