Sounds great, but why create an account mechanism for something that can be accomplished locally? Who's data are you mining?
ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
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Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#32Sounds great, but why create an account mechanism for something that can be accomplished locally? Who's data are you mining?
The account mechanism is just used to scope the devices to „walls“. Otherwise I don‘t mine anything. But I share your sentiment, that this should maybe a self-hostable tool.
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#33I'm confused - is the product finished yet?
This is work in progress project of mine! I have so many ideas how I can make it better, but before I overengineer it just for myself (I think this is typicial engineer mentality), I wanted to submit it to HN before I lose my interest over time, like my other projects…
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#34I am interested to hear what features you guys want in the next iterations! While building ScreenWall, I actually had art installations, home dashboards and train depature info screens in mind. Interacting with the screens and triggering events across other screens is also in the pipeline. Would be cool, if you can give me some crazy ideas, so I can prepare the client runtime better.
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#35Usually I replace a smartphone because it has some hardware fault that makes it unusable and it is hard to repair or the cost of repair vs capability is not very favorable. Even if I was replacing smartphone before they died, I would probably sell them anyway. Do people really have various phones in working order waiting in a drawer?
I try to get rid of my old stuff ASAP, it reduces clutter both physically and mentally.
I know many people who had their old phones and computers lying around because they didn't invest the time to transfer the data. Not long after, the phone was unusable either due to hardware problems or forgotten passwords, and the data is lost forever.
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually I replace my phone when the battery is almost dead and a full charge doesn't last more than a few hours. At that point the phone is usable but not good enough to sell. I usually keep it as an emergency backup phone
You might as well buy a new battery then Did that for 20 € for my Oppo Find X3 Pro at my closest tech store and saved me from buying a brand new phone
I damaged the screen of my pixel trying to open it to replace the battery. It was literally booby trapped to self destroy when trying to repair it
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#37I've wanted to build this myself for a long time but couldn't figure out how to overcome the spicy pillow problem. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I thought it was risky to leave a phone plugged in all the time. Does it need to be a modern version of Android OS that has the smart charging that stops at like 85%?
The safest option is probably to remove the battery and run the phone from a (well defined/build) external power source, e.g. like this: https://yaky.dev/2022-09-06-smartphone-without-battery/
Yes that's what I do too! I didn't know that blogpost but I generally replace the battery with a DC-DC converter module from Ali. You can even tune the voltage and see the indicator change the battery charge level. I put them around 4 volt. The advantage of these modules is also that you don't need a beefy 5V power supply, you can simply grab a 12V or so (I have a full drawer of those from shucking external hard drives) and it will regulate it down nicely. They are 80 cents a piece (10 for 8 euro): https://es.aliexpress.com/item/1005007508685885.html and they can deliver up to 3A or so which is enough to handle the peaks. They're a bit bulky but I just tend to mount them elsewhere. Make sure you use a fairly thick cable to the phone then to minimise losses at that low voltage.
I didn't have to bother with the thermistor but some models need it yes. And some even have an i2c charge level module which is even harder to simulate though it can be done.
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I thought it was risky to leave a phone plugged in all the time I have had phones on a charging dock for long periods. No issues. Unless you have some budget small brand phone that was too cheap to be true, most phones are fine plugged in.
It's a statistical thing. Most phones don't explode their batteries. When you have a hundred or a thousand together, the chance that at least one has a battery explosion starts to reach concerning levels and you ask what you can do to avoid it.
It's not really. I've had a test bench with smartphones at work with open smartphone test farm and about 50% of them cracked their cases open after a year or two. It is not a joke. It really happens. None of them actually got to the point of exploding but it didn't exactly look "safe". Of course I replaced them when this happened. Sometimes it took a while because they were on a stand, we only controlled them remotely so it would take me cleaning the stand or something to notice something was off.
Still, it served our support team really well during the pandemic. They could test wifi setups at the office with different android versions even when they were in a country that was on lockdown themselves.
OpenSTF was great: https://github.com/openstf
I think it's now been replaced by DeviceFarmer: https://github.com/DeviceFarmer/stf
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#39This might be a good alternative to Terminal. I can use a cheap e reader like the Boox Go 7 to display whatever.
Re: ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
#40Ok great loved it, the typical question, can I self host it? Besides privacy, I won’t need internet access.