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So, as has been predicted for years, phone prices are going down.
the latest offer that i saw in the local market was for a huawei 4inch android phone. The selling price is 49euro.
so when you compare and think where a chromecadt costs a mere 35euro and a full fledged phone 49euros, how would you start using such phones?

Would you stick one to the fridge door where you would enter your grocery shopping list? Another in the backyard as a movement detecting camera?

Share how you would use those cheap devices?

Ps the examples i gave are basic lame examples, i hope to hear something really out of the box!!
Man how many times i thought about that!
Specially setting up a tv stick but again, it's a pain to find proper cables.
Some uses would be: iP cams, you could plant many around your flat, for cheap!
Controlling your gaming consoles and computers through many apps, like vnc.
Set up a mobile home server powered by your cheap mobile !
Power it with cheap sensor and use it as thermometer, barometer, radio receiver and emitter depending on your needs.
Plant it in your car as a media player or also as a cam for reversing, and sides.
Use it as a traveler's mobile data tethering device, obviously not in lebanon due to expensive costs(((
Those are the stuff i thought about !
but as it's said you would find many more uses depening on your needs !
NuclearVision wrote Use it as a traveler's mobile data tethering device
I always wanted this , a hotspot in my pocket so I would save battery on the primary device
Like can I use to control a BME system at home?
ok, lets add another approach to the presented question.
are there any android developers here? if so, can you elaborate on how much it would take to:
- create a hello world app
- create an app where one android device says hello, and another replies to it "hello to you"
- extend the app to gather statistics on, how many times the devices have said hello
- extend the app to gather statistics on the latency performance of hello in different situations (incoming call, surfing the net, etc)

i presume that this shouldnt be a challenge especially since so far we have set the limit to two devices, but what about if we have N number of devices?

what i am pushing here for is mesh networking and grid operations with decentralized uniform collective data

so as an example, imagine you have your device that has two pictures in its local storage, you want to secure that by creating copies elsewhere, what about if it would replicate to devices closest to it at that momment. you are in the office, your phone would replicate a copy with your colleagues phone. you leave your office, your protection level for the two pictures has degraded to 1, since you are not close to your colleague (and the data has autowipped out on your colleagues phone), you go home, your mothers phone is in the vecinity, your phone replicates with that. your father comes home, it would replicate with it. your protection level went from 2 -> 1 ->2 ->3. your father left, your protection level moved from 2-> 1->2->2, you leave and go toyour brothers place protection level drops back to 1-> until you reach your brothers place.

this is just a concept to play arround with, an actual implementation would serve multiple requirements and ofcourse be more extensive than what i have simplified in the above.

another angle to this is, that your mesh environment is your "cloud" and not the cloud that is "on the internet"

lets hope this gathers more active discussions.
Well, this is what the IoT movement is all about. That is, adding connectivity to smaller devices that were stand-alone before has become much more feasible. Connectivity add-ons in the form of low-power bluetooth or WiFi components are now much cheaper per unit cost and the protocols have somewhat been standardized. The devices themselves have become powerful enough to run a more capable OS such as Android which makes it more open to the large army of programmers that don't necessarily do embedded but are comfortable with Android and its familiar Java.

I remember someone from Sun Microsystems showing a futuristic demo video around 12 years ago at the university. That video showed a "digital assistant" that can stay with you as you moved from your house to your car and can book appointments for you and tell you that your fridge is running low on milk or eggs. It was meant to sell Java as the "thing" that powers all of this since it can run on your phone, car computer(no consumer tablets back then) and your fridge all using the same stack. All empty marketing gimmiks of course and Sun is no longer with us. But the idea was very exciting and is sort-of possible right now. I expect in a few years(2-8), most of this stuff will be in consumer products.

It's always been a dream of mine to develop such a "digital assitant" that I can call 10 minutes before I get home to tell it to heat-up my dinner or turn on the water heater. Of course you can do all of this with timer switches but the connectivity between devices give you un-matched power and flexibility. Home automation is projected to become a very big market in the next 5 years.

Back to topic; I am not sure I'd use cheap phones for this. For the simple reason that a phone would be designed to be....well, phone-like. And what I want is more like a platform that I can connect things to. Things being sensors, components, or full blown devices that in turn would have its own sensors and components. But yes, if such a platform existed(yes, i know about the different options out there) then I'd start creating my smart home concept and my smart car concept. Smart home is sort of already being created. Smart cars, I don't know of any.
To create a hello world app in android it takes a mere second, without any effort at all, it is actually the first app eclipse or android studio opens with, saying and replying would be easy too, if the device would just monitor sounds starting and ending, but when it comes to actually understanding what the word is and it's specific timing in the sentence, that would take some testing ....
an android phone, although it has the hardware, but you can not control these hardware as good as you want, and then even if you root, and get actual sensor information - am thinking elixir app for instance, that is not enough, since you want to send these through the usb, which again is hard to do, and even harder to translate those for other devices - the phone usb is not made for that, and utilising it would present hardware challenges (USB OTG concept can be used, but I do not think a phone can actually send data while being charged, and if you want to take it apart to charge battery directly, well that would be redundant, an arduino is much easier to dismantle and cheaper to work with).
A 50euro phone is just a phone as much as any other android phone is, but it is just that, arduino would probably serve your ideas a lot better for customising hardware, maybe an arduino network where a rasberry collects data and analysis it and "decides" upon it.
Imagine arduino that would scan for your phone bluetooth and would open the car gate for you as you come in, and when you get to the door another one would open the door lock almost same way - of course security measures and all that. or where the fridge would actually check it's contents - am thinking maybe each has specific location, and things are weighed, maybe your phone will send your location back home and the devices there would analyse the change and heat water for you, or turn on the heaters, or even start the oven where you have already put your food in the morning before you leave.
I think I've just scratched the surface, I have only started meddling with actual working models of those, and I think this has some future, smart houses are a nice addition, but everything has it's limits.
@Alk, thank you for your time to participate in this thread.
from the angle that i am approaching, the idea is to use something that is there. hence an android device in this case. all whether cheap or expensive, have basic hardware features and modern OS. the age of having a zillion gizmo in your pocket is in the past, the future is where things are integrated and augmented. hence, if you have to have something, it would be only one (hopefully). that one thing could be your android device. so, what to do with a device that has computing power and communication features such as wifi, bluetooth, infrared?
it would be more than natural to have the solution as a software app on the device. the example that i gave was just a brainfart example, something as an example to make a point on mesh and grid operations that can be done today within your vicinity. so if i am to rephrase, i would rephrase as:

an app that can commmunicate either via wifi or bluetooth. the app would be able to create a realm, that is where devices belong to the same "group". those that belong to the same realm can freely traverse file back and forth. in this case one or two files. think a bit along the line of bittorent and raid protection. data is distributed and protected. i am not seeking anything in particular here. just a simple concept idea of how devices can collaborate when they are within the vicinity. whatever the solution on top of that is, it could be anything.

what you described as moving arround and things happening arround you as you move is a vision that is as old as history. lots of the type has been done, but still not within the reach of end user consumer. with simple programing, one can achieve a software solution.

even right now, you can buy RFID stickers. you can load an app on your android and as you move arround your house, car or work, and you have those stickers all over the place which you have preprogramed on your devices as what happens, it does. for example, when you are in the bedroom and place the phone on the table, it would change the phone to silent mode or reject calls from certain numbers. or when you sit on your couch, your phone would automatically load your tv remote app and keep the screen on not having to switch on your tv.

rfid enables a lot but i still perceive it to be poor in many perspectives, security, range, durability. bluetooth is way too complex with its bt stack and consumes too much power, has a limited range and triangulation is a weakness as well. will see what will be the device/protocol/sensor that will be enabling the future.

BL
@scorpioxy,
well shared but i still have to insist that your phone as a start should be the end device. it is always good to recycle what is around. and in this case, thou there are limitations, recycle android and hardware features that preexists in a typical average android phone. but yeah, for whatever the means are, android or not, the fact is that there still is a mesh computing going on.

it realy anoys me that google gathers my location info. that information it uses to provide me services such as when will the next bus leave in the morning to work for example. nice development, more to be released but if i want to access data related to me, that is not possible.
so once again we have a wolf in sheeps disguise. if people are furious about facebook and privacy, google is just as bad, people havent noticed that yet.

so because of ownership of your data and data about you is a big question, it is that type of questions that will be encouraging the development and growth of private mesh networking. because it is your habit and routine footprint. if there are people who are talking about your digital foot print, well there is the habit and routine footprint which will be a big topic in the future. its nothing new, its been arround for ages, for example shops that grant you free membership cards that entitle you to some trivial benefits, the hidden agenda in those has been to be able to profile you, your shopping behavior, etc. that data about you is owned by someone else. that someone else might know more about you than you know about yourself when they quantify your behavior and predict your next move. hmm,, this topic alone could be spun into a thread of its own.. starting to loose faith in posting such threads because of the lame poor participation. there is nothing novel or evangelic in what i talk about and some stuff might well be wrong, but this is a forum and in forum people share and talk. talking about forum, need to give samer a smack in the back of the head, this forum could benefit of new features. something that some have wished for a long time..
Oh I'm all for recycling still-useful equipment but in this case you might have to implement the mesh network(some protocol) yourself. Basic functionality is a weekend project so not very difficult. Scaling it, however, might be challenging. Interesting stuff.

But yeah, I was going to say that your point started turning into one about privacy. One of the hats I wear is a researcher in security of smartphones with an emphasis on privacy in Android phones(as in, malware that steals your private information but point can be generalized to anyone taking your data). So don't get me started about such a topic or I'll never shut up. You can protect yourself against such things but the way to do so goes beyond the average consumer's capabilities(probably a lot of techies too). And as usual in security, the amount of "security guards" you need is proprotional to the value of the information. Nobody cares about your location but your credit card number might be interesting.

The research quickly took me to the IoT craze and how using Android on such devices brought the same security problems you would have on your phone. And the situation might be worse because really how would you know that your thermostat had some malware on it? What temperature you like is not the target of course. The malware is now inside your "trusted" internal network and can access other valuable assets. That is the target. Scary stuff.

Anyway, I did it again. If you like to talk about these things, I'm happy to share whatever I can in a new thread. I didn't think anybody was interested in these things around here...
hello,

please do spinoff a thread on what comes to your mind and experience in regards to security. i know there are several hidious ;) characters on this forum who wont be able to refrain from participating in a good discussion.
this much i would comment on security, so far security authentication has been based on some basic factors as something you are, something you have and something you know. in the future, i forsee a fork here where that would be extended with something priviledged and where you are. for example, having a biometric dependent auhtentication that would fail if location is wrong. so as usual, progress brings changes. looking forward to your spinoff on the topic.

as for the example we have been talking about here, yes, it is not shutout that for a proper implementation, at somepoint there might be a need to have a a subprotocol developed as just installing own protocol on android is not the simplest thing (beaurocracy amongst many reasosn).

at this point, as you are aware of IoT, you also are aware of different needs and requirements. one mesh type that serves certain functions, other that serves more functions. for example, your lawnmower doesnt need to operate or collaborate with your fridge unless you want to preorder a cool beer ;) but yeah i guess you get the drift.

actually the more i contemplate, the more it would be interesting to see if there are proficient android developers who could create a simple mesh application that would operate over ip or bluetooth. and see how how a simple scaleout solution could be constructed. and then pool the resources together and see what could be done.

if you kind of think of it, there is a tremendous computing power on devices, and an unimaginable resource for computing if we hypothetically imagine that at least phones in one country would participate in crunching data, or distributing files, or sharing movement/location information. thinking of the later, that would be fun, create a google map where you would pin a meshed network of android devices saying hello to each other. then start thinking of what sublime message to distribute according to the mesh distribution, for example, devices that are to the east say good morning to the devices in the west, and devices in the west say goodnight to devices in the east. ;)