The rig is not the important part of this article. What is extremely cool is Samsung supporting upcycling initiatives and going as far as having approved ways of unlocking and replacing the OS in the devices with stuff such as Ubuntu Core and others.<p>This could be huge! I believe a better title would be something related to the upcycling project.
It looks like the Samsung rig is doing about 2600Kh/second at about 4W per phone. This is a hash rate of 1538.46 J/GH.<p>In comparison, the Antminer S9 will do 13Th/sec for about 1275W. This gives a hash rate of 0.098 J/GH.<p>In essence, an actual bitcoin miner is about 15,000 times more efficient. I'm all for recycling, but this is not an effective solution.<p>Why not release the documentation for the displays for use in other products, or release technical documentation for other parts of the board? This would be a much better step in recycling instead of building an anemic space heater with bitcoin.
This is super cool! I was just thinking about what all you could use old phones for, and they could easily replace a lot of existing devices.<p>Like Nest thermostats and cameras - there's no reason those devices couldn't be replaced by old phones running custom software, instead of buying purpose built hardware that costs $150+. My old iPhone4 is just as capable hardware-wise as a nest cam - so why can't I turn it into that?<p>Amazon Echo Show - that could just be an old phone docked to a speaker base.<p>Smart Light Switches - phone on the wall.<p>Dedicated alarm clock - old phone on the night stand.<p>Host device for chromecasts or AppleTV? Old phones have more than enough power, they just need an HDMI output adapter.<p>Lots of possibilities, especially with something like their bitcoin rig that ties a bunch of devices together for more horsepower.
Is the author conflating "cryptocurrency" with "Bitcoin?" These devices' CPUs might be able to mine Monero, but definitely will not be able to mine Bitcoin without losing money on power.
A manufacturer could make it easy for everyone if the day after the warranty expired a pop-up gave you the option to carry on using your device with whatever updates happen, install stock Android or install stock Ubuntu. They could even charge extended warranty or for updates to their version of an operating system so long as the option was there to use your device the FOSS way.<p>Old phones could become the standard device replacing things like the Raspberry Pi if it was that easy to switch them over to post-warranty FOSS mode. Even better would be if this upcycling was a requirement, so out of warranty devices could default to being a compute device with well defined interfaces to cameras and sensors. The EU could pass laws to enforce 'upcycling' standards so all electronics is not waste but has at least some usable compute capability even if thermally inefficient or with latency issues.
Reminds me of this paper: <a href="https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/25/towards-deploying-decommissioned-mobile-devices-as-cheap-energy-efficient-compute-nodes/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/25/towards-deploying-decomm...</a>
I have a few old android phones laying around.<p>I have two app idea:<p>write motion activated camera app that stores motion activated pictures on google drive - special folder. Only me and my family have access to that google drive folder. Files will be deleted from that folder after N days.<p><pre><code> --- Turn your old phones to security camera.APP
</code></pre>
Or another app can do time lapse pictures convert to movie where I can mounted on car's dash board and turn 1-2 hours trip into 10-20 seconds clip.<p>What do you guys think?
Good, bad, there is an app for that already?<p>Any other idea?
I really don't see the point of this. The mining power is so low it wouldn't even be worth the cost to operate. Samsung should focus on updating ALL of their current devices with OS and security updates rather than replacing them with another OS and not updating the drivers or firmware when they get bored of it. Their flagship devices are still not on a monthly security patch cadence and they treat their low and mid range phones as if they don't even exist.