How to Revive an Old Laptop by Adding a Dock to Run It from Your Smartphone

For most people, the only thing to do with an outdated or broken laptop is throw it away or donate it. Consequently, there is a practically unending supply of old laptops out there that you can get for little or no money. Fortunately, as Cmcinhk shows in this great tutorial, you can bring them back to life using your smartphone.

The idea is great, because just about everyone has a surprisingly powerful smartphone that they carry with them at all times. With a bit of electronics know-how and elbow grease, you can take advantage of that fact to make an old laptop useful again. Cmcinhk’s method was tested with an Android phone (a Google Pixel 2), but it should be possible to make it work with an iPhone if you jailbreak it.

The first step is to completely gut the laptop of everything except the LCD. Then you can get the LCD working again by ordering an LCD controller, and connecting it to your phone through a USB-to-HDMI Displaylink adapter. Cmcinhk replaced the laptop’s original keyboard with a BlueTooth model, but it may be possible to interface with the original keyboard in some cases. Finally, he 3D printed a cradle for the phone and reassembled the whole thing with a lot of hot glue.

After that, it’s just a matter of using apps to setup your phone so it acts like a desktop. Depending on how far you want to go with that, you may need to root your phone. Or, if you want to skip all of that, you could pretty easily use a dedicated Raspberry Pi in place of the smartphone. Either way, this is a great way to upcycle old laptops!