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Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#151

Post by hawski »

mherrmann wrote: post #2

I set up a home movie system on a very old unused laptop. Installed Linux (Xfce) on it because it is very lightweight and connected it to my TV with HDMI. Now I can watch downloaded movies, but also stream on YouTube, Amazon, Netflix etc. on one device without having to jump between UIs with their various kinks. Very happy with this, because it was free and works better than anything I had before.

Does it have HW decoding? Do you use VGA-to-HDMI adapter or just my definition old very-old is very old itself? ;)

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#152

Post by pkorzeniewski »

bangboombang wrote: post #94
pkorzeniewski wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a Xircom RealPort Ethernet 10/100+Modem56 (REM56G-100) PCMCIA card that has a packet driver for DOS and a TP-LINK TL-MR3040 mobile router that has a ethernet socket, mTCP does the rest on software layer. Yes, a lot of people install Linux on their Librettos, but I wanted something oldschool and be able to play DOS games.

Huh, does mTCP ship an ssh client now, or are you building it yourself?

My mistake, mTCP doesn't include SSH client, there is a separate project [1] for that.

[1] http://sshdos.sourceforge.net/

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#153

Post by hawski »

I have a Thinkpad T42p, that I don't use anymore. I wonder how hard would it be to gut it and with a small SBC like Pine64's Rock64 and some additional board make it useful again. Question is how to drive: LVDS display, keyboard, touchpad and trackpoint?

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#154

Post by reaktion »

mjstone wrote: post #123
sprobertson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in the general technique, "teach a man to listen for beeps..."

I FFT incoming sound buffers, and if the 2KHz band is the highest for a suitable number of consecutive frames, then I send the email and stop listening for a few minutes to avoid double notifications. 2KHz is the frequency of my machine's beep. Just triggering on overall noise level alone would notify me each time the machine goes into spin, but using the FFT allows it to be more discerning. (I'll try to publish the…

I'd appreciate seeing your code for this - I've intended to write a similar app for listening to an old alarm system I have.

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#155

Post by shtack »

faitswulff wrote: post #150
shtack wrote: post #68

I have an old iPhone SE plugged in and running a simple web server via (disclosure: my app) http://pocketweb.io The two sample pages seen there are hosted from this phone. Edit: There's an Android version available as well.

This is really neat. What are the limitations on what you can host? Are they just static sites?

Just static sites for now, although you could have them talk to a backend somewhere else. A longterm goal is to allow basic backend code to run on the phone as well (ie. a simple wrapper around sqlite).

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#156

Post by philshem »

philshem wrote: post #119

+ Thinkpad X230 (2013 model, i5, 8gb ram, ssd) with docking station as a media center running Kodi[0] + Samsung Galaxy Express I8730 (2013)[1] as a remote control for that media center[2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software) [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_express_i8730-5271.p... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.xbmc.kore&...

Forgot to add an older entry-level android tablet (7”) used as a digital photo frame, running Fotoo:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bo.fotoo&h...

It’s a better display and cheaper than any off-the-shelf digital photo frames. Fotoo syncs the photos from cloud storage, so family members can upload to the frame, too.

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#157

Post by ProZsolt »

I got a Raspberry pi 1 B+ for free because it wasn't powerful enough for anything. Put it inside my old but perfectly working laser printer. Got a Google Cloud Print(RIP) enabled printer.

https://github.com/ProZsolt/runbook/blob/master/raspberry-pi...

Re: Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

#160

Post by MattSayar »

reeddavid wrote: post #30

Not a company, but sharing a personal project: I got a free broken 55" TV and turned it into a big daylight panel. I got a great explanation of why this works well (fresnel lens) from the DIY Perks channel on YouTube: Turning Smashed TVs into Realistic Artificial Daylight ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JrqH2oOTK4 ). The main board had failed so the screen was black and the backlight cycled on and off. After disco…

What's the energy draw on this compared to, say, an LED lightbulb?
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