IoT Smartphone Reuse

The personal drone is basically the peace dividend of the smartphone wars, which is to say that the components in a smartphone — the sensors, the GPS, the camera, the ARM core processors, the wireless, the memory, the battery — all that stuff, which is being driven by the incredible economies of scale and innovation machines at Apple, Google, and others, is available for a few dollars.

Wired editor Chris Anderson, quoted in Foreign Policy

Chris Anderson’s famous epiphany is hardly limited to drones. Almost every product that joins the Internet of Things today owes a debt to this trend, which has made cheap single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino available to the masses and spurred an incredible wave of innovation.

And while high-end smartphones still command premium prices in western countries, the rest of the world is enjoying the trickle-down benefits as manufacturers in Asia and elsewhere are now producing vast quantities of low-spec but fully capable smartphones at prices the developing world can afford. And Ericsson’s latest forecast report shows the effect this could have, predicting that of 3.5 billion additional smartphones in use by 2020, 80 percent will be owned by users in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

There’s a trickle-up effect at work here, too: Between the vast numbers of discarded handsets and the minimal cost of new phones from manufacturers around the world, some designers are starting to ask whether the Internet of Things actually needs its own set of specialized hardware. Why build a sensor from scratch or pay well over $100 for a single-board computer and various add-ons, when you can get the same collection of components pre-assembled as a cheap smartphone for as little as $30?

Here are a few projects that are taking advantage of this trend, turning smartphones (or their silicon guts, at least) into the hardware that can power all sorts of IoT use-cases.