The other day, i was sitting with my trusty Thinkpad T60p and my Galaxy S and suddenly i got this idea... i want to build a Android phone into the palmrest! So now i'm just throwing thoughts out the get myself started.
It would be great to have everything Conky provides now, calendar, email and other stuff, placed on a small LCD on the laptop.
So i need to get a spare palmrest for the laptop of eBay, in case the idea doesn't really work out, and a Android phone i can play around with. It seems as Windows Mobile phones are cheaper 2nd. hand, and as i don't really need the phone part of the phone to work, it might be the way to go. So what WinMo phones are good enough to run Android to get: booting into Android without user interaction, touchscreen and hardware buttons, maybe wifi and 3G, but only it it's good enough to provide a access point, USB net and Android 2.x?
What native Android phones should i look for? I think i'll need the hardware buttons to be on a separate PCB, a small (2,8" to 3.2") screen. CPU and memory isn't really that important. Also the LCD and main PCB needs to be quite flat. If i had brought a screwdriver to school, i could have measured just how flat.
Is there a launcher that can do everything in landscape mode?
Have anyone done something similar to this? Build a Android phone into anything else?
I need to modify the battery circuit to make to phone run of the laptop battery, as i don't think i can find internal room for it and connect the USB port in the phone to the internal USB header where my fingerprint reader isn't going to be anymore.
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I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with Android phones (with HDMI out) and connecting them to a larger touchscreen (rather than a TV), and can the touchscreen then control the smartphone via the HDMI cable?
I should probably mention that my end goal here is to drop a 10" HDMI touchscreen in the car, and each time I enter the car I simply connect the phone to the touchscreen and then close the phone in the glovebox, basically using the touchscreen to remotely view and control all the phone features.
I'm afraid that HDMI does not support touch screen input. The type of touch screens you are referring to use either a USB or Serial (RS-232) connection to the computer, in addition to the video interface, to provide Touch Screen input. While I'm sure with a little digging there might be something like this to control your phone through a computer (My Mobiler allowed for this on Windows Mobile 5-6.5 phones through either USB or Bluetooth), I don't see being able to do this without a computer (or carputer) as it was, being involved.
So basically, the Triumph would need a USB host to get it done?
KryptoNyte39 said:
So basically, the Triumph would need a USB host to get it done?
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Yeah, my guess would be that that would be the minimum requirement, as well as obviously some sort of driver support for what would essentially be "Mouse input".
I Think your best bet would be, if you could find an old netbook. One with a touch screen, you could use it as the link to you Phone. I know of 3 programs that let you output your Android phone to a computer monitor. All work on the MT and one lets you use your mouse and keyboard on the MT.
You can find the one I use here.
And if you want to try and make your on touch screen for a netbook take a look at this link. would make for a fun project.
For the other programs have a look at Ashot and [email protected]. All work with my MT.
Thanks, folks. I was kind of eyeballing this thing;
http://www.mo-co-so.com/Double-DIN-Lilliput-669GL-70NP-C-T-7-Touch-Screen-p/mcs-lil-669-dd.htm
But based on what's working right now, the Lilliput screen would still only be a display, and I'd still be controlling it from the phone somehow.
I'm not a programmer I'm afraid, but based on the current state of car stereos, I'm amazed Android hasn't progressed into this market rapidly. Let's face it, Pioneer's current $1000+ head units have just a fraction of the capabilities of my $129 Optimus V.
I considered an Android based head unit, but I think the better path is to be able to tether to the phone when you enter the car in some fasion, and then just simply use the larger in-car display to view the Android device and control it from the touchscreen. In this fashion, I don't need yet another Android device, and the in-car unit is basically without much logic. I'm afraid we might be a couple years out yet.
Yeah, such a panel like that wouldn't really work all that well for your application. The aspect ratio of the panel isn't ideal, and it appears the touchscreen works off a serial interface. Even worse, it is a resistive panel (which is leaps and bounds worse than the capacitive touch panels we're used to on our modern phones). Overall I think even if you did wire something up the experience would be fairly lack luster.
Todd42 said:
I Think your best bet would be, if you could find an old netbook. One with a touch screen, you could use it as the link to you Phone. I know of 3 programs that let you output your Android phone to a computer monitor. All work on the MT and one lets you use your mouse and keyboard on the MT.
You can find the one I use here.
And if you want to try and make your on touch screen for a netbook take a look at this link. would make for a fun project.
For the other programs have a look at Ashot and [email protected]. All work with my MT.
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Click to collapse
Todd, I hear what you're sayin'. I actually have an old netbook that I hopped up with an SSD. I'm wondering about stowing the netbook, rigging up some kind of start button, and then forming a MIMO monitor into the dash ...
http://www.mimomonitors.com/
(just throwing some ideas around in case it spurs another person's inspiration)
I was given an HTC Incredible the other day, and I quickly found out that the digitizer was non-functional, so I took it apart and found obvious liquid damage inside. Several areas of the board were crusted over with what I assume to be residue from the evaporated liquid. I remained hopeful that the only problem was a dead digitizer, but after carefully cleaning up the board, I noticed some scorched resistors near the digitizer's ribbon connector on the motherboard. On the off-chance that I misdiagnosed the cause of the dead touchscreen, I restored it to factory via recovery, but as I expected, still no go, of course.
It's frustrating, because the device is in beautiful shape in every other way. Screen looks great, not a single scratch on the phone itself, it boots into recovery perfectly as well as into Android.
I fully realize that I will never have this phone working as it was originally intended without swapping out the board, which I don't really plan on doing. I also have no interest in using this as a phone. I'd like to see this phone repurposed as a headless Linux box on my home WLAN. With its specs, it should be able to run Debian and Asterisk quite well (works great on my Seagate DockStar with 128MB RAM/700MHz ARM5-based SoC.) I just hate to see an otherwise perfectly good embedded computer go to waste because I can't enable debugging via the touchscreen.
Is it possible to use a breakout board attached to the microUSB connector to utilize any sort of external input so that I could jump into the phone and turn on debugging/root the device? Or would that require HID drivers to be installed on the device beforehand?
Another idea that I've considered is possibly reflashing it with a rooted ROM or maybe changing some settings on it via CDMA Workshop, I would still need to get into mode for that by pressing ##3424#, right? Argh. Is there another way?
Do either of these options sound viable? Any other suggestions? It should go without saying that I'm well aware that this could be a brick already, but it just seems as though there must be SOMETHING that can be done to at least give me rooted ADB access in the future.
Thanks in advance!
I'm guessing I'm out of luck? Either way, it's not a big deal. It's not as though it cost me anything, but it'd be nice to put it to work in some way. As a Linux geek, there's always a nagging feeling I get when I see a Linux-based device sitting in the corner being under- or non-utilized. Especially embedded.
i want to disconnect my phone from all networks, with no possibility of network communication on the device at all, because tinfoilhat. i basically just want a portable computer that i can fit in my pocket, use for music and run software on etc without the damn thing feeding data about me to google or the NSA. as far as im aware however no devices with reasonably up to date hardware and the possibility of using a decent OS exist, and im quite attatched to my cubot gt99s lovely screen.
i hear physically removing the GSM and WiFi chips are not an option, could someone explain why if this is so? are there any other ways in which a mobile phone might be secured at the hardware level? if it comes to it im not afraid of getting my hands dirty with a soldering iron, but id like ot avoid having to buy a completely new device with lesser hardware if at all possible
So, a coworker pointed me at a chrome book, and said, "Look, it's awesome, 10+ hours battery!" I was skeptical, I've heard horrendous things about chromebooks' usefulness, but then I found out chromebooks give you access to TTY, so in theory you can use all the nifty CLI utilities that make Linux/Unix systems so great to work with. So I went back and reexamined how I use my endless supply of various devices, from desktop to mobile phone. For the most part, I use my phone to call, stream, or browse. I use my laptop to connect to my development machine (It's just inconvenient to hold my code on my local machine for a variety of reasons, and it's not really safe practice anyways.) A short while ago, I was looking for a tablet with a data plan, and I couldn't find one - even carriers with unlimited data plans don't support tablets with unlimited data plans. Damn it! Then, as I was researching chromebooks, I realized something spectacular - despite tablets having a thicker, and therefore heaver screens, tablets are in general 1/2 the weight of chromebooks. (wtf?) So I went in search of system on a board computers, and I found MK802, which could cover all the essentials - a keyboard w/ trackpad, wifi, bluetooth, audio, video. But then I realised - I've got a heap of old android devices from the G1 all the way up to my most recent (but still outdated) Samsung I515 (whatever that's called in common-folk-tongue). And I thought to myself, "Why not use the PCB out of one of those old, working-but-outdated phones to make a DIY tablet or chromebook which will probably weigh less than COTS chromebooks, register as a cellphone with the carriers, have unlimited LTE data, and 20hr battery life?" The Droid Charge seemed like the best candidate. Although I have a couple extra I515s, the awesome thing about the Droid Charge is that it has an HDMI port. Work on the fly, come home, hook it up to a proper monitor, instant win!
Unfortunately, I haven't ever worked with drivers, firmware or the likes. I could probably MacGyver a way to hook up a keyboard with a touchpad to use the micro usb jack (I mean I'd just need to emulate hooking the DC to a dock, right?), but the real blocker for me would be the screen. I imagine there MUST be a way to swap the stock LCD and touch screen digitizer on the Droid Charge, and hook up a 10-12in one, probably from some other Samsung product, but that's completely speculation. I was hoping someone on here could help me out with hashing out how to do the screen swap up to a 10-12in screen.
Thanks,
Misha
Hey folks!
I recently thought of possible projects to realize with my old Samsung Galaxy S2. It has a shattered screen, but beside that its perfectly working. I thought it's somehow a shame to leave this device unused, since it is actually such a powerful computer. And I guess that applies to many of you: You get a new phone and your old phone rests somewhere in a drawer. You could sell it-but either it some misfunctions (which are often simply from a beauty aspect ), or you simply want to keep it. That's how I got to the idea to use my old Galaxy S2 as a cloudserver.
For that I basically installed Ubuntu Touch on it (which is available for many Android devices) and then on it the ownCloud server. And it works ! Now I have my phone running on the charger and a perfectly working cloudserver. At the moment I use a 32 GB memory card, but it would be possible to attach a mass memory via USB OTG. But then I would have to power the phone directly from the wall plug (which should be possible with a normal 5V charger and a diode), but ... meh, next project .
A small demonstration you can see here:
To read the whole story with step-by-step guide, check my new blog:
http://klonom.com/turn-your-old-android-device-into-a-cloudserver/
What do you think of it?