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RPi5 seems a bit underpowered for all the sensors & control and offloading to a computer through wifi seems problematic. A Jetson Orin Nano would seem to be a better choice for a robot. Unfortunately Nvidia recently substantially increased the prices for their jetson devkits due to component shortages (DRAM,storage, etc), and what was $250 now costs $499 :(

I got a wired (usb-c) ultrasonic cutter for around $100 (not this one), and it's amazing for cutting precise holes on electronic project boxes (plastic / abs).

Beaglebone Black with PRU

Or just suspend to RAM on backup finish/time and use wake on RTC alarm (and set to turn on after power return on power failure if needed), no need for extra HW.

I think we are confusing the perfect from the good enough.

If there's an ecosystem that allows converting old hw, lot of people will less resources can make reuse of that e-waste.

Installing ubuntu nowadays is a few clicks that anyone minimally proficient on computers is able to do, not much more difficult than installing a browser "or an app on their phone".

Sure, there's "dozen of apps" for that iOS/Android, but if the HW+OS combination is no longer supported, how can we continue using it or update it ? $50 might not seem a lot to you or me, but it's a lot to many people in the world, specially with something they already have. Using cloud for inference, which is also not free or private, bringing again dependency from some entity, where local HW is perfectly capable of basic object detection. I personally have "professional" PoE cameras with built-in object detection for surveilance, but see a use case where cheap access can also be useful.

I'm still mystified why there's so much push back from people to own and make use of old HW for whatever purpose they see fit.

You are right, my drawer doesn't have a single Apple device, since that company is probably the reason we got into this situation to begin with, so at least I voted with my wallet.

I just gave you an use case about having family members using old computers for all their needs. If those old phones can continue to be used with software updates not locked down by their original hw vendors, don't see why that is a bad thing.

I also didn't mention any use of k8s which I don't make use of or using rpis as nodes on a computer cluster ("homelab"), so you are extrapolating in a very weird direction.

By nodes I meant, say robotic applications, simple room surveillance camera, baby monitor,audio streaming, multimedia/tv remote control, where a rpi/custom hw could be perfectly be replaced by an old phone, since it comes with imu, cameras, audio, touchscreen, wifi, storage, etc.

All my personal and family computers are more than 10 year old, running latest Ubuntu. They have probably slower CPUs than that 8 year old iphone, but can run the latest web and email clients just fine. These are almost all salvaged from e-waste. I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.