Locked bootloaders mostly

You can also find new prepaid phones for 50$ each. Just don’t activate them.

Brings back fond memories of running torrents with Transmission 2.84 on my old iPhone 4 with Cydia.

Nowadays I dumpster dive for old computers and parts to Frankenstein together what I can with Debian as headless servers.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, repurposed to sail the high seas.

Arrrr!

Not as a knock to the author but I feel like this is a wildly optimistic / simplified take. The type of audience pis serve is either industrial as part of a product or process or tinkerers that often want to follow some set process like installing retroarch.

Not to mention not all phones are hackable, they might not have the gpio or software you want or ecosystem (I’m quite fond of the Poe hats for example) and frankly if you’re buying a pi you’re obviously not the person who has the perfect hackable phone lying around or otherwise can easily source one

Thats a great read. I explored similar things with my rooted phone. Samsung galaxy m30s. Wrote something on it as well on what I did, may be you will also like this type of experimentation?

https://nimitbhardwaj.github.io/posts/hermes-agent-rooted-an...

On a similar note, old smartphones (depending how old of course) are way more powerful than a Raspberry Pi. You can turn them into a Kubernetes cluster [1].

[1]: https://blog.denv.it/posts/pmos-k3s-cluster/

Hey, I can answer that! Because me and my family have always had Verizon and when I recently went through alllllll the devices I have ever owned, I would need to go back to circa 2010's Galaxy S7 to be able to get a rooted device, which as Claude keeps reminding me, "isn't what I want, but might be good enough"....

Raspberry PI's don't give me near the struggle and I never dumbly signed a contract that I didn't really own the device I was purchasing (that I am completely aware of)

I was thinking about using my old phones with something similar, but I'm worried about battery. When permanently connected to charger, won't they swell, start fire or something like that after longer(er) period of time?

What are some useful things you have built using pie? Which you use maybe on a daily basis.

I too have a bunch of cheap android phones of diverse vintage lying around.

Some are bought with US carrier locks - never activated or unlocked. Any chance they can be unlocked with today's tools and not dumped into ewaste.

There are a few simple projects for home automation i have in mind but the rooting felt like a daunting task.