I stopped buying dedicated dash cams after realizing my old phone does it better

Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar.

I’m a fan of reusing thin-clients, old laptops, and practically any outdated device I could lay my hands on. Smartphones have joined this list as of late, and although they’re not quite as versatile as all the PC hardware I’ve bought from flea markets, they’re good enough for simple DIY projects.

Take my custom dashcam, for example. Budget-friendly dashcams tend to have poor camera quality, and I’d rather not dump hundreds of bucks on a high-end model. But since even budget-friendly phones ship with a camera, microphone, and even GPS, they’re perfect as makeshift dashcams.

Turning a phone into a dashcam is pretty simple

Droid DashCam works well even on non-rooted phones

For a completely standalone setup involving just the phone and its internal, typical dashcam applications work pretty darn well. Droid DashCam, for one, meshes incredibly well with old phones, and it’s what I used for a while before migrating to my over-engineed setup (and I’ll go over that in a bit). While it does need a paid version if you want to get rid of pesky ads, Droid DashCam can record everything on the road and store the footage with proper timestamps, GPS coordinates, location address, and other information.

On old devices such as mine, Droid DashCam lets me set a hard cap on the amount of space for the footage. Once it hits this limit, the app automatically overwrites the oldest video with fresh footage. Likewise, I also appreciate the option to start the recording as soon as I connect my phone to Android Auto.

For night drives, Droid DashCam can adjust the brightness, exposure, and other camera settings on its own, before switching them back when I need to drive during the day. It even has a toggle to prevent videos from being overwritten every time the G-shock sensor in my phone detects vibrations, and I can even use my tiny computing companion to access normal apps, as Droid DashCam keeps an eye on the road even while it’s in the background.

But you can also leverage your phone’s SIM to send ONVIF streams to Frigate

Tailscale helps with the remote connection

As soon as I realized it’s possible to pair my phone’s camera with the NVR powerhouse that’s Frigate, I decided to create a dashcam involving the app. After all, I already use Frigate to control the video streams and store footage from all the surveillance cameras in my arsenal, and adding my phone to the mix would be perfect for a FOSS dashcam.

To be more specific, there are plenty of apps that can turn a phone’s camera into an ONVIF stream – one that can be picked up by Frigate. I typically use the free DroidCam app on my phone, but IP Webcam and other tools work just as well for this setup.

Since my phone can accommodate SIM cards, I don’t have to worry about my DIY dashcam losing access to the Frigate server in my tinkering cave. However, since my home network remains locked behind CGNAT, I’ve installed Tailscale on my phone and connected it to the tailnet that includes my server nodes, including the one hosting the Frigate container.

The rest of the process was as simple as adding my phone’s (or rather, the one given on Tailscale) to my Frigate instance’s config file. I’ve also created short retention plans for the footage grabbed from my phone to avoid choking my server with old footage. And since everything remains on a PC armed with a few HDDs, I don’t have to worry about my DIY dashcam accidentally deleting videos while I’m on the move.

It even works with Home Assistant and local LLMs

Unlike pre-built dashboards and their locked-down ecosystem, my phone can run the Home Assistant Companion app – thereby letting my smart home control hub access a bunch of sensors on my phone. And that opens doors to some wild automations.

For example, I can have my HASS setup accept the GPS stats from my phone to start certain devices and tweak the thermostat before I can even reach the porch. With Home Assistant supporting a Frigate integration, it can even pull the footage from my dashcam. Better yet, I’ve combined the Gemma-4-E4B model running on my old PC with Home Assistant, which summarizes the contents of my DIY dashcam’s stream every few hours.

But there’s a lot more you can do with your smart phone

If you’re more of a fan of server projects, I’ve got a few other ways you can recycle your phone. Thanks to Podroid, the cheapest phone in my arsenal can double as a Docker server capable of housing lightweight productivity tools. Likewise, I’ve got another phone and a full-sized Android tablet serving as a smart panel for all the gizmos I’ve connected to Home Assistant.