As many people, we have had a few different mobile phone models over the years and in most cases we’ve made a good use of them until their end of life.
I’ve found 3 different Android phones and reflected on how these sophisticated devices are sadly not being used in any way. They have a full-colour display, a camera, microphone, battery, WiFi connection, decent processor, plenty of memory and capability to extend storage using SD card. Not to mention the GPS, gyroscope and others, all while being fully programmable using Android SDK.
So I took on a quest to find some interesting uses for them. At first I wanted them to become an extra screen of my computer, especially since I also have a bit larger Nexus 7 tablet that has a nice screen. Unfortunately, using any VNC server doesn’t really work as well. There is some commercial software to help, but it wasn’t going to work on Linux, which was disqualifying it for me.
I tried briefly to turn them in to a text-only terminal. With tmux it can work surprisingly well 🙂
However the text is small, screens are not sharp and after all I don’t only use terminal these days (I used to, but not any more). So I started to think about just displaying a full-screen website on it and controlling the content remotely from a server.
This sounds good in principle, but I really could not find a full-screen app that would display a website without any controls, that would work on my HTC Wildfire (Android 2.2 Froyo). So after much experimentation and trying different approaches, I’ve decided to try the obvious solution: write my own app.
This sounds like a rabbit hole, but I was amazed how quickly I was able to get something working. That was really encouraging, even if it was hard to get the old SDK working, I could find plenty of old examples online and solutions to many of my problems. It didn’t happen overnight, but after about a week of evenings spent on Android app and Python server, I had a fully working setup with:
- Photo-frame mode to display pictures on an interval
- Message mode, where a message is displayed (as HTML)
- Say something using Google’s TTS engine
- And other various configuration and debug options that give me remote control over the device.
I’m quite pleased with the software part, even if there are issues across devices, it’s still a nice solution allowing me to do what I want.
One cool trick I’ve came up with is that instead of writing a UI for controlling all the devices, I’ve written an OpenAPI spec and started to use the Swagger’s ‘try me’ console instead. This works well and everyone at home can now use it too!
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