AI can speed up a lot of the manual labour needed to bring even an almost dead, 10-year-old device back to life. My Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (oxygen, MSM8953) was dead. With AI help and my own knowledge, I ported/rewrote the missing drivers, and it now runs Nura (postmarketOS) with working camera, torch, SIM, phone calls and SMS. Only the loudspeaker is still broken.
Everything is up for anyone who wants to install it, or to understand the changes and manually write the patches for mainline: https://github.com/sv1sjp/mi-max2-oxygen-msm8953-nura-drivers Testing, feedback and PRs welcome.
Man, at first glace at the picture without reading the model, I thought that was the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. I thought I was gonna be able to pull that old puppy outta storage and get Nura running on it.
I’m not a fan of AI, but this use case of getting older dead hardware some life is interesting. Hopefully the process you used could allow it to one day bring other old hardware back into use.
Wake me up when someone creates an LLM that at least delivers deterministic, reproducible results.
LLM code is not workable for widespread adoption, but for individual use cases it can do a lot of interesting things!
But the docs/code can definitely be used to support manual labour.
I’m hoping this trend will enable some bootloader hacks/bypasses for older Apple devices, as well.
I was curious what AI model / product you used to do this? I’d like to help the efforts for some of my own old phones.
Claude Opus 4.8 - 5.5.
@sv1sjp congrats, very encouraging
