How to turn an old or broken Samsung phone into a smart home sensor

A much shorter life cycle than many other products and sales that have grown steadily in recent years has ended with transformation Obsolete electronic equipment In one of The main problems Nowadays, with millions of tons of waste produced by industrialized countries every year. Waste from electrical and electronic equipment (the so-called WEEE), So smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearable devices, etc., must be disposed of in a correct manner for at least two reasons: to avoid the pollutants that are present ultimately harming the environment and to recover materials from waste, even very valuable and expensive, which can instead of So reuse it elsewhere.

Fortunately, in recent years sensitivity Towards this problem, it has grown exponentially, and more and more people are no longer treating end-of-life electronic products as common waste but as private waste, just as they should. In Europe, for example, the so-called “person-to-person” has been planned for years: when we buy a new mobile phone, we can deliver the old phone to the store, without paying for its disposal.

However, there is another way to hit two goals with one hit, goals Reducing electronic waste And downsize the form Single Use: Reuse the device. A computer equipped with overwhelmed hardware can be reused over time and does not perform well, for example, in a living room as a TV multimedia hub, while a smartphone can be given a second life that is no less useful to the user than the first such as an external hard drive if it contains A good amount of internal memory, or it can be kept in the car for use as a navigator, or even as a file Smart home sensor – Oh Smart home, To put it in English. The latter is the option on his mind Samsung For his old smartphones The galaxy.

Samsung Galaxy that could be redeveloped

Samsung recently launched an initiative aimed at giving a second youngster to older smartphones, possibly confined to a drawer waiting to be noticed and deciding if and how to get rid of them. Samsung’s initiative, which is an extension of the Galaxy Upcycling program, has been recalled Galaxy Upcycling at home, Something we can translate as “Reuse of the Galaxy device at home“.

In fact, it’s a kind of app placed inside Samsung’s main app for managing smart homes and its networked smart devices, which is Samsung SmartThings. You better clarify immediately that the Galaxy Upcycling initiative It is currently in beta Hence, it is available in a limited number of countries: the United States, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. However, the fact that it was also announced in Italy indicates that when the beta phase ends, it should also be available in our country.

I Galaxy Upcycling supported devices at home They are all from the Galaxy S, Galaxy Note, and Galaxy Z series distributed starting in 2018 and equipped with Android 9 and above. In other words, these are the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 +, and all of the Galaxy S10 family products and the S20 and S21 families. Then there are all the Samsung Galaxy Notes starting with the Note 9, and finally all the foldable devices, then the two Galaxy Z Flip (Z Flip and Z Flip 5G) and two Galaxy Z Folds. Finally, but it is the simplest requirement to fulfill, the SmartThings app should be at version 1.7.63.22 or later.

The second life of the galaxy

From recognized devices to Galaxy Upcycling at Home, it is clear that the initiative is also usable through the latest products (Galaxy S21, for example, was only officially released in January 2021), but as we said it becomes very interesting if Tapped on old smartphones (relatively) Like the Samsung Galaxy S9, which, in the meantime, may have fallen into disuse for its three-year-old.

In other words, the idea is to convert a potential rejection into a file Internet of Things device (Internet of things o The Internet of things) For a smart home in which it can act, for example, as Baby monitor Or allow Remote control of pets. At the moment, Galaxy Upcycling at Home offers only two scenarios for use, but as the Korean company itself defines, the capabilities available in the future will be expanded along with the number of supported Galaxy smartphones.

The galaxy as an observatory, or as a sensor

Today, Samsung’s initiative allows the Galaxy device to accurately recognize home sounds and save specific recordings for listening even when you are away from home. Example: An old smartphone detects a certain sound, such as a voice baby’s cryThe meow of a cat or someone knocking on the door; At this point, a notification is sent to the reference smartphone through which the user can decide to listen to the recording of the sounds that triggered the alarm.

The second possibility is one Brightness sensor reprogramming In any smartphone. So, for example, you can set an old Galaxy Upcycling smartphone at home so that when it detects an ambient light level below the set level for reference, it automatically turns on the lights, the TV, or any other smart device. The house is connected to the Samsung ecosystem.

The company has also considered the fact that similar features end up significantly affecting the monitor’s battery, so the Galaxy Upcycle at Home also includes some Dedicated battery management solutions So consider reducing consumption to a minimum by turning off all non-essential components of the phone.