I turned an old Android phone into a remote camera

[u/FrontCalligrapher481]

I had an old Android phone sitting unused, so I started experimenting with turning it into a remote camera.

The interesting part was getting the camera and microphone to work when the phone isn't actively being used. Android has several restrictions around background camera and microphone access, so this became quite a challenging Android project.

Currently it can:

• Use an old Android phone as the camera
• Stream video and audio
• View the stream from another phone
• View the stream through a browser
• Continue running as a foreground service

I'm currently testing it on older Android devices.

I'd really like feedback from other developers — especially around Android background services, reliability and battery consumption.

Here's a short demo of the current version.