Overview
Phone Revival Lab is my ongoing effort to turn discarded, screenless phone motherboards into headless compute nodes. I work through device recovery, Linux boot configurations, networking, and remote access to give hardware with broken displays a useful second role.
Each device presents a different problem. A working setup depends on the bootloader, kernel, available recovery interfaces, and the hardware that still functions. I keep per-device records of verified specifications, recovery procedures, working images, and unresolved issues so that a successful boot can become a repeatable setup.
The General Mobile GM8 now runs Alpine Linux with USB networking, SSH, Wi-Fi, and services that survive a reboot. The Vestel Venus 5.5x also boots into a headless Alpine environment, with automatic USB networking and verified Wi-Fi scanning. These devices use different ARM architectures and memory capacities, which makes workload selection part of the engineering.
The project also extends into the physical setup: parametric, 3D-printable holders provide a way to organize boards and leave space for ventilation. The recovered nodes support my broader experiments with fleet management and distributed inference.
This remains an active hardware lab. Some boards are working nodes; others still have boot, networking, or recovery problems. The documentation distinguishes those states and records what has actually been tested on each device.
Technologies: Linux, Alpine Linux, postmarketOS, Android, ARM, OpenSCAD
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