Turning your old phone into a security camera

Turning your old phone into a security camera isn’t a bad idea, but you can make it even more useful if you set up Home Assistant.

When our phones stop working as well as they used to and we can’t keep them as our primary devices anymore, there’s a tendency to just throw them in the trash or trade them in for a new one. But there are plenty of things you can do with an old phone that’s not great anymore, and one of those things is turning it into a security camera — something we’ve talked about on XDA before. But there are many more things you can do with an old phone, and if you ask me, you’re better off turning it into a remote to control your smart home.

Whether it’s smart lights, a TV, or almost anything else, having a dedicated device can make it much easier to manage your home’s electronics. Having trouble managing all your smart home gadgets? You might want to run an instance of Home Assistant on your NAS Before you get started with this idea, you should know that in order to make this work, you’ll need a Home Assistant server, which is separate from your phone.

Home Assistant is an operating system or container and it’s very lightweight, so you can have a Docker container on your main computer, repurpose an old computer, er even use a cheap Raspberry Pi to run the server. It seems a little intimating at first, but it’s completely doable, as I’ve demonstrated in a previous article. Once the service itself is running, you can add your smart devices to it. The great thing about Home Assistant is that it has integrations to support the vast majority of smart home brands, and you can bring them all together under one roof.

You no longer need five different apps if you have one light bulb from LIFX and one from Philips, then a Samsung TV, and so on. There are exceptions, of course, but if you have devices from any reputable brand, they’re very likely supported by Home Assistant. In my home, Home Assistant controls lights from Xiaomi’s Yeelight brand and GE Lighting, TVs from LG, Google’s smart speakers and displays, and it even connects to a Brother Wi-Fi-enabled printer from 2014.

It’s very capable. Your old PC can become useful in a whole new way, while reducing your reliance on cloud services to control your smart home. That second part of the setup process, where you add all the devices, isn’t done directly on the PC where Home Assistant is running. This is where you can actually start using that old phone, since you just need to access the Home Assistant URL or use the app to connect to your server.

You can also do the initial setup on a computer or something with a larger screen, if you prefer. While you set things up on one device, the changes are made to the server itself, so any device that connects to the server later sees the same devices and layouts that you set up the first time. At this point, your phone becomes a super remote that can control all your devices in different ways. The way each device works and the features it supports will depend on the device itself and the integration, but there’s quite a lot you can do, and you can organize things in a way that makes sense to you.

For example, if you have a room that is used more frequently or has more smart devices, you can have your phone plugged in permanently and attach it to a wall or something to use it as a sort of dashboard for the devices in that room. Alternatively, you can have it as something you take from room to room to control everything around the house as you need it. This means you’ll have to recharge every few days, but it might get you a little more flexibility.

Since I like to use my phone to control both of my TVs, I prefer having it as a mobile device that I can use to replace the individual remotes for each TV. It’s actually a good bit easier to use the Home Assistant remote for LG TVs than it is to navigate LG’s smart TV UI a lot of the time, so it makes for a great replacement. And yes, phone batteries can be a little short-lived, but if you make this a Wi-Fi-only device and turn off cellular data, along with disabling any other apps that might use up battery, it will still last a good while before you need to charge it again.

And of course, through different pages, you can add all kinds of controls for all your smart devices. Turning lights on or off, changing the brightness and color, playing or pausing media, all of that is possible. You can even store some media on Home Assistant itself and easily cast it to any device that’s recognized as a media player. Beyond serving as a dashboard for Home Assistant, phones have a lot of sensors and technology that can be integrated into your smart home setup in a wide range of different ways.

For example, using Bluetooth, your phone can work as a presence sensor and trigger certain responses in Home Assistant, such as turning on a light in a specific room. If you end up building an army of old phones, you can have each device doing something different and making your home even smarter without having to spend extra money. It’s a really powerful tool that only gets better with time. Whether it’s a phone or PC, old devices have more of a life than we often give them credit for.

Home Assistant is one of many ways you can extend the life of a device by giving it a more specific purpose, whether it’s as a server or a dashboard. Sure, a security camera is also a totally valid use for a phone, but you can also use as a sound sensor and much more. As for a PC, Home Assistant is just one of many services you can run on it. I used a spare mini PC I had lying around as a NAS, and it’s been pretty great, too.