Elliot was describing a build that uses the board from a used, roughly $25 Android phone as the video and control link for an RC plane. He says it is one of several recent projects that reuse old phones as cheap single-board computers.
Well, nobody's broadcasting anything for your old CRT TVs, so you've got to do it yourself.
…he's got a ton of Raspberry Pis in there. What he's done is he's got a big switch mode power supply that could supply lots and lots of amps at 5 volts, and he's running them all off this big switch mode power supply because that many Raspberry Pi wall warts would take up a lot of. Extension leads.
…stuff gets taken care of at the low level in the microcontroller on the flight controller, which makes a hell of a lot of sense. The video and the control stuff gets to take place on the formerly cell phone, whatever it is, single board computer that he's made out of it. What's fun here is that we've seen a bunch of repurposing old cell phones as single board computers projects lately. And I've always wanted to know why we weren't, you know, collectively hacking on cell phones. I've been asking myself this question for 10 years. And this year, it seems to be, we're starting to do it. And I love to see it. This one's just beautiful. He pops the brains out of a Xiaomi 8 note. I guess 25 bucks used gets you one of these.
What a time to be alive when a phone like that is 25 bucks.
If it has a broken screen, I bet you can get it even cheaper. You don't even need the screen in this hack. And that's actually kind of one of the neat complications that goes on here is that when he undoes the screen, he finds out that the phone boots up extra slow. It looks like it's searching for…
I think one of the reasons we haven't been reusing old cell phones is that a lot of people want to use it effectively as the machine it is with a display and interface and stuff. And often they come with, they'll run a Linux of some variety, but they'll come with some very proprietary blobs. So you…
