I saw a talk at my university by a prolific robotics engineer who explained that for small drones designed to work by swarming & collaborating, it is much more cost effective to use old Samsung Galaxy phones as the "brain" of a drone platform rather than integrating standalone CPU's. As far as I know they still use this as their primary design strategy.
Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
51–60 of 73 posts
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
For an individual, RPi is cheaper if your time is worth anything at all. On the other hand, if enough devices of the same type become available for this purpose it might make sense for a business to do this at scale.
> For an individual, RPi is cheaper if your time is worth anything at all. The only reason that's true is because groups have catered to the device and have ready-to-go instructions. Were the same effort put into making Samsung S2/S3/S4 etc phones easily converted, I'm not sure the time difference would be all that much at all.
If only
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#53Interesting idea, but I suspect if you tried it you'd quickly run into practical limitations. I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues that 'normal use' doesn't, and I suspect mobile phones would be similar. The pace of phone evolution means you'd have an ongoing effort to get new kinds of de…
Well, why instead of 24*7 at 100% not use it in periods of 4 hours (with one hour breaks) at 80%; closer to the use they were intended for.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#54Well, the cost of a raspberry Pi for a home server is actually quite high when compared to using the busted or obsolete phone gathering dust in your drawer. Since there are probably millions of these, why not recycle into cheap servers given the benefits of their low power use (and the possible ability to draw power to charge during cheap periods and run off battery during expensive ones).
For an individual, RPi is cheaper if your time is worth anything at all. On the other hand, if enough devices of the same type become available for this purpose it might make sense for a business to do this at scale.
Better yet, why not develop a standard protocol of sorts to enable future devices to be used this way in a consistent manner?
This could then be used as a basis for phone recycling programs: manufacturers could run the collection (and e.g. hand out gift cards for its own new products to encourage the users to turn them in while also profiting from it), and then sell the collected phones in bulk to datacenters.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#55My company is working on pocket-sized routers/firewalls/DNS servers. These sit between the "smartphone" and the untrusted, e.g., public, wifi router, acting as a user-controlled gateway. The user makes a one-time change to the settings on their smartphone to use the user-controlled gateway. This enables blocking ads and other unwanted outgoing connections without having to be physically at home or work, i.e. in a loc…
What is the company/product? I'm curious about an all-in-one solution as I already do this with an extra Mikrotik router and things like pi-hole or OpenDNS. Currently a mAP [0], but there are more inexpensive options.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#56I'm not sure they really did a good comparison here. Cost comparing an 8-socket system with 2 cpus installed buying new vs buying broken phones on ebay isn't really fair. If I were going to for cheap compute, I'd look for used (or otherwise discounted) chromeboxes. No distributed UPS, but small and gigabit ethernet, reasonably current intel processors for good IPC, not terribly large.
Yeah, the table is missing at least a few more columns. Whats the breakeven point for a $200 server off eBay? 15000 savings in capex pays for a lot of opex.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#57Interesting idea, but I suspect if you tried it you'd quickly run into practical limitations. I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues that 'normal use' doesn't, and I suspect mobile phones would be similar. The pace of phone evolution means you'd have an ongoing effort to get new kinds of de…
I suspect certain games, like Ingress, or GPU-intensive games, routinely max out phones' computing hardware. Chances are that badly overheating models are reasonably few and already known by gamers.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#58I saw a talk at my university by a prolific robotics engineer who explained that for small drones designed to work by swarming & collaborating, it is much more cost effective to use old Samsung Galaxy phones as the "brain" of a drone platform rather than integrating standalone CPU's. As far as I know they still use this as their primary design strategy.
They probably meant using the Odroid XU4 which is a nice platform built around the Samsung Exynos-5422, not an actual phone
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#59Isn't this the storyline to HBO's Silicon Valley ? Someone took it seriously?
The Filecoin scam got millions out of it...
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#60Energy efficiency relative to the same compute power for newer devices has been a major factor for not using old computers to perform computations. Maybe this principle carries over to low powered mobile devices, certainly some basic economic principles between computations per power consumption prevail at different orders of magnitude.