Thread

1. noahnathan25 · 1790859627 · focus · HN ↗

   You could just use an old second-hand phone for under $60. You’d get a built-in battery, much more RAM, and a screen included. For the output, just use a $3 ESP32 connected over Wi-Fi or USB. Seems like a much better deal for a lot of projects.

   1. Reubachi · 1790865614 · focus · HN ↗

      Making any recent second-hand smartphone a SBC-equivilent field computer is always a custom job/not scalable.

      OF course, that shouldn't matter for most tinkerer jobs like a CarPi. But anecdotally, I tried using my old iphone 13 (idk why I tried this) and then a couple old galaxies for my car project taking data from bluetooth dongle and relaying to a custom gui I made. Of course also dealing with power cycles and screen, data trasnfer etc.

      Very, very quickly it became easier to justify buying a SBC for the same project

      1. noahnathan25 · 1790866950 · focus · HN ↗

         The goal of the Raspberry Pi was to have a SoC that could run Linux on a very cheap board, but that's no longer the case. There are cheaper options on the market today... and if you really need to use Linux... an old smartphone can be a testing solution. I also recently used a Xiaomi router (it has little internal memory) to run Linux (OpenWrt) and do some testing

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