Repurposing old out dated phones with a new OS

[Retro6]

Hi all,

I have a bunch of old outdated Android phones and some old Windows phones, all have good batteries but because they are old there are a bit useless now and I've been thinking there must be something you can do with these old devices.

Is there anyway at all to get access to the main chip via USB from a PC to wipe the old OS and install firmware/software such as a light Linux OS or other operating system?

Another thing I would like to do is partition an SD card so that some of it can be used as RAM in the hopes to squeeze a bit more performance out of old devices if that is even possible.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[randal]

Check out Hardware Haven on YouTube.

He turned a bunch of old phones into lightweight Linux servers running docker.

There’s lots of options.