Readit NewsHOZO NeoBlade Wireless Ultrasonic Cutter
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It's a more rigid solution that doesn't let you ssh in (unless during backup time ;-), but it saves electricity and it is implemented in 10 minutes (5 for an Amazon order and 5 to plug in and set the timer to your backup hours). It's also a more robust solution - little can go wrong (the only thing is you need to balance backup time against electricity/time savings as backup size grows).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N700_Series_Shinkansenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900
For the family that has a techie willing to jump through a dozen hoops to set those up, sure it might mitigate some e-waste. However I doubt that's applicable to most or even 10% of people. Moreover I don't see how an unlocked OS is necessary for most of the applications you mentioned. Why do you need an unlocked bootloader to turn a phone into a camera/baby monitor? Aren't there a dozen apps that basically serves that purpose? Finally, as the saying goes, "[insert OSS project] is only free if you don't value your time". Sure, you can spend an entire weekend turning your old phones into cameras, installing frigate on a docker container somewhere, and adding a coral TPU to do object recognition. Or you can pay $50 for a 2-pack of wyze cameras which have cloud connectivity and object recognition out of the box, and is in a far better form factor than a smartphone.
The point isn't that exactly zero phones will be diverted from landfill, just that approximately zero phones will be.
If there's an ecosystem that allows converting old hw, lot of people will less resources can make reuse of that e-waste.
Installing ubuntu nowadays is a few clicks that anyone minimally proficient on computers is able to do, not much more difficult than installing a browser "or an app on their phone".
Sure, there's "dozen of apps" for that iOS/Android, but if the HW+OS combination is no longer supported, how can we continue using it or update it ? $50 might not seem a lot to you or me, but it's a lot to many people in the world, specially with something they already have. Using cloud for inference, which is also not free or private, bringing again dependency from some entity, where local HW is perfectly capable of basic object detection. I personally have "professional" PoE cameras with built-in object detection for surveilance, but see a use case where cheap access can also be useful.
I'm still mystified why there's so much push back from people to own and make use of old HW for whatever purpose they see fit.
They certainly DON'T. I don't know where this estimate is coming from, but it's inarguably wrong
The average person doesn't have any need for "computer nodes". Just because some homelabbers want to create a k8s cluster off their 10 year old phones, doesn't mean any significant proportion of phones are going to be salvaged in that manner.
I also didn't mention any use of k8s which I don't make use of or using rpis as nodes on a computer cluster ("homelab"), so you are extrapolating in a very weird direction.
By nodes I meant, say robotic applications, simple room surveillance camera, baby monitor,audio streaming, multimedia/tv remote control, where a rpi/custom hw could be perfectly be replaced by an old phone, since it comes with imu, cameras, audio, touchscreen, wifi, storage, etc.
Approximately nobody is going to be reprogramming their 8 year old iPhones to "prevent creating digital waste", especially when the CPU is unbearably slow and the batteries are well worn out. Say reprogramming is important for user freedom or whatever, but claiming it's going to make a meaningful difference in reducing e-waste is always going to be a spurious justification.
It's next week, so unlikely to happen and I'm not sure what technology I would need to make it all work. Something like Lora plus a way to make the phones work.
Uses a rpi 2 w, works well, can solve and scramble 3x3x3 cubes, using just 2 servo motors.