I still use my FP3 with the latest LineageOS, and I’m dedicated to do it even if modern applications are probably not very optimised and make my FP3 sometimes sluggish. E.g. Waze takes at least 20 seconds to load, and Android Auto makes the phone notably slower; OSMAnd is also very sluggish.
However, some family members are not so dedicated and swallowed the iPhone pill.
So here I am, with a couple of unused FP3s. So what uses could these have? It happens that I’m starting a home automation project (based on Home Assistant and Zigbee devices mostly), so they may be useful, but how. The possibility of uses would greatly widen if I could run some Unix flavour on it, I guess, but is that even doable? I’ve heard about postmarketOS for instance, but I wonder how well are the peripherals supported.
Hi not sure if this is what you’re looking for but you could sell them as a whole unit or for parts. The camera modules are especially in demand since they are no longer available in the webshop. Please check the market section of a forum for ideas.
Make sure offline map data is not on an SD card (access to it could be significantly slower than to the internal storage chip), and make sure you are using rendering engine version 1 …
OMG, although I can’t move the maps to the internal storage (not enough space), the v1 rendering engine is day and night. Thank you very much, I’ll go faster during my treks.
Also, I found some guides that explain how to install the Home Assistant core on Android with termux & proot.
Another idea for a phone:
Disable the lockscreen
Set the screen-timeout to 15 seconds
Enable the Clock-Screensaver
Start the Home Assistant app
So now it works as a clock and if you touch the screen, Home Assistant’s Lovelace interface appears, so you can control your whole Smart Home easily. I do the exact same thing with an old tablet and it’s awesome. If you use Lovelace a lot you can also disable the timeout entirely to have it always ready to go.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions. Will definitely try Comaps.
Re: Ubuntu Touch, I couldn’t make it (bootloop after install), and the issues reports are ridden of this problem with no answer AFAICS. But I just could successfully install PostmarketOS. Now I got to know what to do with it…
I already have a NUC as the HA server, and the HA install on Android doesn’t seem production-ready for me.
Using it as some Home Assistant display / remote is a goo idea I’ll think of.
Maybe also as some some home camera? Or maybe a media player (with a Lyrion client)?
As mediaplayer I would take a look at snapcast and mpd. This is integrateable into Home Assistant and you can play the same music on all connected speakers at once (or any subset).
Yea, doing the same with Music Assistant add-on (has snapcast already included). This can be controlled in Lovelace directly or Music Assistants web-ui.
Also Dicio just came to mind. It is a FOSS voice assistant for Android, which can be triggered with a wakeword (similar to “OK Google”).
Still using my FP3 and not looking to upgrade for a bit yet but another option is use as a wildlife camera. You can get adapters for most makes of electric drill batteries to turn them into USB chargers for it. I forget the name of the app but there is one to turn the phone into a motion detect camera. (Till it finally died I was able to get over a week out of a 5amp hour Makita battery doing this with an old phone - can’t even remember the make now!
It was working fine-ish for me, too, with the offline maps on an SD card … but putting them to internal storage instead made OsmAnd work significantly faster for me .
Of course not every SD card is the same, but when encountering performance issues this is something to look at.
However, on my Fp5 OSMAnd runs fine from external storage - and as I have plenty of it, I can keep lots of countries. Maps which actually aren’t used may be deactivated so you can enable them later without downloading again
On the FP2 OSMAnd was somewhat sluggish but I think that was due to a lack of CPU power …
