alt Hacker NewsScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space
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Usually I replace a smartphone because it has some hardware fault that makes it unusable and it is hard to repair or the cost of repair vs capability is not very favorable.
Even if I was replacing smartphone before they died, I would probably sell them anyway. Do people really have various phones in working order waiting in a drawer?
Oh wow, although I submitted it some days ago, I somehow got on the front page! Thanks for that! Also as a note: this platform is nowhere near finished! I had this idea in my mind for a long time that I wanted to reuse my old phones and tablets as displays in my home. I also know that finding the right apps for these old platforms is a challenge in itself, that's why I went the route of creating an ES5 (that nobody writes anymore!) web app that most of these devices still support. The client's whole purpose is to display canvas and media files that the server dictates on-demand via websocket, while keeping a synchronized clock. On Instagram I always saw these very cool widgets like retro clocks, split-flip boards, YouTube subscriber counters that I felt urged to buy. But I thought to myself that the old phones I already have could also do the same. I am a long-time software engineer myself, but could never take the time to validate whether my ideas work. So I thought, why not try it out with Codex. After long prompting, supervising and correcting, I got a very usable solution that I now pleasantly use myself at home.
I am interested to hear what features you guys want in the next iterations! While building ScreenWall, I actually had art installations, home dashboards and train depature info screens in mind. Interacting with the screens and triggering events across other screens is also in the pipeline. Would be cool, if you can give me some crazy ideas, so I can prepare the client runtime better.
This might be a good alternative to Terminal. I can use a cheap e reader like the Boox Go 7 to display whatever.
I literally wanted to use RasberryPi to build this for my desktop since i loved those desk widgets showing cool info like the weather or time ... this is so cool!
Congrats, this looks very cool! I haven't tested it yet, but is it possible to make it work offline? I'd prefer devices running unsupported or unmaintained operating systems to avoid Internet access altogether.
The oldest device I found that works with ScreenWall as a widget display, is an iPad 3 (2012)!
Ok great loved it, the typical question, can I self host it? Besides privacy, I won’t need internet access.
Sounds great, but why create an account mechanism for something that can be accomplished locally? Who's data are you mining?
Junkyard Jumbotron redux? ;)
https://github.com/mitmedialab/Junkyard-Jumbotron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAUtSVSTbzU
The flight sim community is going to love this project for home cockpits.
Working on ScreenWall (https://www.screenwall.app) because I had old phones sitting in a drawer doing nothing, and now I use them as passive widgets on my desk and wall. I use the browsers of the devices to join a shared "wall". From there I can push images, video, gifs, or a synced canvas to it (and any other old screens I add) without installing anything. Started as a one-device hack for my desk clock, but it scales to syncing multiple screens at once if you've got more than one old device lying around.
I've wanted to build this myself for a long time but couldn't figure out how to overcome the spicy pillow problem.
Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I thought it was risky to leave a phone plugged in all the time. Does it need to be a modern version of Android OS that has the smart charging that stops at like 85%?