I also meant microcontrollers. I am sure someone would remove chips from old devices and resell if they were reprogrammable. Also you could use them for your hobby for free.

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gruez a day ago | parent | next [-]

Why would anyone go through all that hassle when you can get a ESP8266 from aliexpress for less than $2? The skilled labor cost alone needed to desolder the chips is going to wipe out any savings, not to mention the hassle of fabbing custom PCBs to work with your hodgepodge collection of microcontrollers.

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codedokode a day ago | parent [-]

There are countries where people would sit all day desoldering phones if they were paid $2 for each. Also even in my country minimum wage is less than $2/hr (although that is rare).

	▲	gruez a day ago \| parent [-]
		Note $2 on aliexpress gets you a fully assembled module. If you're trying to repurpose chips after desoldering you still need to sort, test, and resolder them.

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BenjiWiebe a day ago | parent | prev [-]

The chips in phones would be horrible to work with - they're too small. Plus, the SoC is much more complicated to deal with than a microcontroller intended to be stand-alone.