Use an old Android phone and a FT232R board to control external GPIO Adafruit Industries Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! [Video]

We like to make projects to interact with the world but don’t have huge budgets. You can likely do something like this: get an old Android phone and connect a development board to it via USB.

Mobile phones, even old ones, are powerful yet tiny computers. One just needs a way for them to talk to the outside world.

Doctor Volt connected an older Samsung Galaxy S4 to a USB-connected FT232R board to add external control lines (GPIO).

The serial adapter is recognized by the existing Android OS and within the standard Android development environment this module can be used. Within this demonstrator it’s merely used to blink some LEDs and react to inputs, but it shows how to reuse phones in a non-destructive manner.

See trhe video below and more on Hackaday.

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