A few months back I was purchasing a new cell phone to replace the one I had at the time. I made a mistake, purchasing an international Nexus 5X instead of the U.S. variant that would work with Verizon.
Thus, I now have a new development device to do fun things with! I used an android application known as Linux Deploy to install Arch Linux into a chrooted environment which can be VNC'd into. Once I had accomplished that, I loaded Octoprint into Arch Linux, purchased a USB C OTG cable in order to allow my phone to be connected to the printer, and then fiddled with file permissions on the serial device /dev/ttyACM0 (which on linux turns out to be used for our printer communications over USB).
The end result looks a lot like this.
- This is me VNC'd into the phone's Arch Linux ARM environment, from my Arch Linux x64 environment on my desktop.
Totally overkill when a Raspberry Pi could be used, but this was a device I had laying around that I wanted to see if it was capable of driving my printer.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that my intention is to use the phone as a remote server that I can remote into and control the printer. It can be accessible either with a display mounted to the front of the printer, or by a handheld device. The phone itself can actually VNC to its own chrooted environment, and be mounted on the front of the printer as well.
It is meant to be a versatile solution which can be configured for many different uses. just about any old smartphone that you have lying around which has OTG (USB hosting) capabilities can be used. The only other gotcha, is to make sure that your phone is capable of utilizing loop devices to run Arch Linux or any other Linux environment you want.
If you have any questions, I'll do my best to explain.
