I made an app this past weekend using a $30 android smartphone to send me notifications when my dryer was done drying. They sell these phones at a loss thinking you’re gonna buy a data plan, don’t do that. Instead use for DIY projects in place of a raspberry... pi or esp32.show more

$30 phone used is called the Moto G Play 2024. You can get it from Walmart. Here’s the repo for anyone who wants to run it themselves:

How long is it lasting whilst running the app though? Seems like you'll be frequently charging it. That seems like more work than just having a look to see if it's finished once in a while

With the screen off somewhere between 5-10 days. But could be left plugged in if needed.

I assume this is the one? It looks like it's locked to "Straight Talk" and is only available as pre-paid, as cheap as a no-contract $25/month plan. But if it's pre-paid, you can just not pay and not have a plan. Motorolla sells them for $130ish? So I would need to subscribe to the cheapest plan for at least 4 months for them to just break even compared to the retail price, but I assume they get a decent discount.

Yes that is the one! great deal when using it for home automation projects. Goes toward my dream of one generic device I can buy and use for all sorts of use cases without modification.

note to anyone thinking about doing this with an old iphone: it's significantly harder to make a persistent background task on ios than it is on android, you have to do a weird workaround where your app wakes itself up at an interval to do whatever check you want

Reminds me that the helicopter they sent to mars uses an old Samsung galaxy phone for the pitch and yaw controls

Do you know what's going on with the business end? Like are they subsidizing this by $ X ? Because just getting a bare android that boots up and is runnable seems like an opportunity.

definitely razor and blades model where they need you to buy a data plan for it to work for them. BOM and landed costs ~$80 Retail of unlocked device is $130 So selling for $30 is quite a gap. Part of the justification for them is cost of customer acquisition.

Webcam function too

Exactly! IP cam functionality, motion detection, etc.