GoKawiilSmashed Toilet Phone Web Server
Behold my smashed Samsung a70 smartphone. It's seen better days but it's serving up this nice webpage for your enjoyment
Don't feel bad for this beat-up phone. Sure it's been smashed, then later dropped in a toilet before sitting for over a year in a bag of rice; whatever, that just adds character to the phone, right?
Life Signs
Our story begins after that year in a bag of rice when I found it by accident in the garage, and decided to see if there were any signs of life. After a long sit on the charger I was pleased to see that indeed there were life signs, and the readings were strong! Once charged back up to full, the phone booted up as if it were brand-new in the box! That's where the fun stopped however, as it immediately became clear that the touchscreen no longer functioned, and thus its days as a portable phone were long over.
You would not be foolish to think this should be the end of the story; how are you supposed to do anything with a device you can't control? It may seem counter-intuitive but actually Android devices have pretty good mouse and keyboard support; most now even support external monitors. It stems from a desire to make the smartphone the center of your computing life. The thinking from these big tech corps is that if your phone can do everything, why even both with a desktop in the first place. That logic is debatable depending on your needs, but it helps in this case so I'll take it!
The Plan
I've long been interested in the possibilities for old phones that have outlived their 'portable phone' days. It might be because I remember when computers ran at 8 MHZ with 640 KB of RAM, and could do all sorts of fun things. These 'old' phones by comparison are hundreds of times more powerful than those old computers, and have all sorts of sensors and networking abilities built-in. Surely they can serve a need other than food for the recycler.
While I have some neat ideas for remote control and other IoT applications, a web server is kind of like the "Hello World" of repurposing hardware. If you can get it to talk to other machines, all the other features can be bolted on afterwards.
Technology Auditions
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