Cool things to do with your old smartphone!

These days everybody start to have old smartphone laying around. I decided to find some cool usage for my old smartphones!

1) Wild life photography

With application such as Motion Detector Plus, Peephole or Simple Interval you can install your smartphone in the forest and wait for an animal to come across. The two first application are triggered by motion while the later simply takes interval picture which is great for time lapses.

Using an external battery pack is recommended for any project longer than a few hours as these drain the battery pretty fast. Also so sort of weather protection would be nice, but I haven't figured out yet what I want to do... It will probably be a 3d printed case...

2) Network camera / 3d printer watch

The cool app: IP Webcam allows you to turn your smartphone into a network camera accessible from any web browser. In order to access it from outside your network you might need to unblock and port forward the port 8080 in your router. Also having a DNS is a nice thing to avoid remembering your IP address. Check my article on Wake On Lan for more details.

3) Monitoring light exposition

Using Phyphox application, you can easily stream the values of your smartphone sensor to a web browser. Its support most sensors such as light, accelerometer, microphone, gyro, magnetometer, gps, etc...

This spring I plan on using it to measure the sun exposition in various spot in my garden. I hope to create a heatmap with the sun exposure to better place my plants the following years.

One can use it to know if someone enter their home using the accelerometer or the microphone or to count the number of time a movement occurred (while doing exercise as example). The tone generator could also technically allow to connect a relay to the headphone jack and use it to activate via a web page!