Would love to see a community like Rasberry Pi for linux on old phones! Maybe that already exists?
Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#32Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#33My 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 location where the user can "trust" the network.
The pocket-sized router runs open source software chosen and installed by the user. Users have a generous choice of operating systems, from Plan9 to BSD to Linux, as they do for the RPi. Baseband is either absent or physically disabled.
The main advantage I see to leveraging old "phones" for this is the power supply.
While I have seen small form factor routers made for travel, they are generally not rechargeable.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#34Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#35The question is can you trust these devices?
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#36Interesting 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 devices into your 'cluster' (figuring out how to root them, identifying how to network them, rigging up some kind of custom rack-mounting hardware, etc). And there'd be a bigger turnover of 'replace expired device' than with fewer newer designed-for-server nodes.
The paper also suggests running a hypervisor on these, but I suspect you'd find that firmware/boot rom locks you out of EL2 (hypervisor mode) on most hardware.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#37Interesting 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 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
Interesting data points. Have any of these folks written a blog article on the subject?
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#38Well, 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.
> 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.
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#39Imagine those on the attic, connected to a internet connection, forming a mesh-net with all houses nearby- and activated if distributed computation power is needed. Converting abundant power into computation.
Imagine a mobile web server. For events, geocaching, emergency services, and other on-demand situations. It could serve local wifi to serve its pages.
There a bunch of LAMP apps on Android. You just need a phone that open enough to let you 'share' a connections. Otherwise you would just be better off with RPi setup as an access point.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esminis.se...
Re: Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
#40My 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…
Why wouldn't someone just do that through the software on their phone?