I see nothing for MY retired phones here.
Wake me up when google lets me launch a useable shell headless.
If I could reliably use old phones with Linux. I would be able to do a bunch of fun ideas
researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a pathway for the second life of phones through the exploration of “phone cluster computing.” This is a process whereby the motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed as a general-purpose computing platform. With Google’s support, the university plans to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones that will provide hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly-manufactured hardware and their associated emissions.
Well, it’s better than nothing. I presume these are trade-in phones. And it means that in this era of memory scarcity, existing memory is being reused instead of scrapped AND new memory isn’t being earmarked for these data center deployments.
However, this appears to currently be a one-off publicity deployment, not a go-to strategy.
“We installed postmarketOS on some older hardware, look, we are saving the planet!”
I am being facetious of course, but it would be great if manufacturers+google opened this up to everyone.
This is a process whereby the motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed
the university plans to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones
Is a bit more than installing postmarketOS on some older hardware
it would be great if manufacturers+google opened this up to everyone
absolutely, one of my biggest wishes is that AI inference could be split up and done on home computers, similar to Folding@Home, with points and maybe even $ given to those who participate
We’ve never had more computing power in our hands but it feels like so much of it just sits idle now
Maybe it’s all the Pixel 6a handsets with worn batteries.
