Have been thinking about this for a couple years. I have old phones kicking around. Battery shot, hardware dated, but the camera(s) and mic and antennas still work. Would be cool if there were a way to set them up (powered) to stream audio/video or even take stills at intervals (or motion-activated) and then sync the content to the rest of the devices on my network.
I don’t know how complex the programming for something like this would be. But I suspect it’s trivial for those who do know.
I’m not aware of software to achieve this, but I assume it wouldn’t be possible to activate the camera based on motion detection, as the phones do not have hardware for this. Sure, it could be possible to have the camera working 24/7 and only record when there’s movement in front of it (e.g. watching for pixel changes in the image being captured) but I doubt these cameras can sustain that kind of uninterrupted use, meaning at some point they will just fail. Just my thoughts, as I find the idea interesting but would love to have that same kind of solution.
I had an old HTC phone that I used as a garage security camera for 2-3 years straight. It had to be restarted every couple months, but otherwise worked fine. Now you can get a $20 IP camera that surpasses it in every way tho.
Glad to know. 2-3 years is a good lifetime, especially when compared against keeping the phone unused and stored in a drawer.