I just discovered this and it works fantastically on any old / unused android device you might have lying around, I was shocked at how easy it was, all the instructions are there, once you have it running all you need to do is set your router DNS settings to your pihole IP address and presto! Ads and trackers are gone!
Take the battery out if you can to avoid lithium fires.
Old batteries on constant charge… I worry about this kind of thing.
This is where fair phone and framework laptops shine. So easy to take the batteries out.
Most mobile devices won’t work without batteries. The best way to work around this is to supply it with 4.2V (anything between 3V and 4.2V will do) over the battery connector.
I think I might have broken something, even when I clip the battery back in I get nothing 😟
I have an old Nexus running as a weather station. I just bought a WiFi controlled plug for the power supply so it switches on and off continuously
Thanks for the tip. Got a tablet running HA and thus plugged in 24/7. Just ordered a smart plug to schedule the charging.
Home assistant runs on old tablets now? Or are you saying as a dashboard?
You might also be able to turn on Battery Idle Mode, although it’s not supported on every device.
Is there any modern day android phones that work without the battery. I feel like they’d probably run POST checks to make sure there’s a battery inside. Maybe fairphoness?
Good concept but the WiFi latency and the processing speed would I’m sure slow down your browsing experience.
Cool though!
Running a pi-hole doesn’t require much juice. It’s a fancy DNS server, not a router. First gen raspberry pis were pretty weak and even those things didn’t even break a sweat.
For home use, they barely do much. At an enterprise level, then it’s another story.
I haven’t seen any notable issues yet, a lot of people use a wireless pi zero to do the same thing so as long as you aren’t running a state of the art gaming rig (which i’m not) I think it’ll be fine
Your client hardware wouldn’t matter tho. State of the art or whatnot of a gaming rig would be fairly low. In sure most modern mobile phones create more DNS requests these days compared to a Windows machine and steam. It’s the configured software on the hosts that will dictate how much traffic your devices will get. A lot also cache by listening to the TTL. There will be some form of additional latency but your average Joe won’t probably notice.
I’m not sure about that. The average consumer router is fairly underpowered but is still capable of handling the needs of most home networks.
Wifi adds latency. Adding 30-300 ms of latency will noticeably affect your browsing experience.
Oh shit. Something to use that old galaxy s4 I still have for. Been wanting to set up a pihole, but didn’t want to buy a raspberry pi just for that.
On should have a look on the energy saving behavior of the device, as android tends to shutdown processes occasionally. Which is pretty bad for a DNS server IMHO
