5 more old gadgets worth keeping because the open-source community found better uses for them

Published Oct 4, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. It's a frustrating situation when your gadgets become useless long before the hardware actually fails. You may have old devices stuffed in a drawer that are no longer supported or are simply outdated. Open-source software could give you a reason to pull them out of the drawer again. Nintendo Wii Turn your old console into a retro powerhouse Credit: Maursk8/Shutterstock The Nintendo Wii was a huge hit for Nintendo, with the innovative console selling more than 100 million units. The motion-controlled remote opened up gaming to a far wider audience than the typical gamer. Nintendo has long since moved on, with the Switch becoming the company's best-selling home console of all time. That doesn't mean that your old Wii is now useless; the homebrew community has spent years working on how to make a Wii do far more than Nintendo originally allowed. For example, USB Loader GX is an open-source game loader that allows you to access your game collection from USB or SD storage rather than having to use the original discs for each game. The Nintendont project allows you to run GameCube games on your Wii, including features that the original console didn't offer, such as virtual memory cards and support for additional controllers. There's even a project called WiiLink that restores many of the online channels and features that were lost when WiiConnect24 was discontinued. The second-generation Echo Dot Keep the hardware, ditch Alexa The launch of the first Amazon Echo smart speaker propelled Amazon to the forefront of the smart home scene. The company brought the concept of controlling your smart home with your voice to the masses, and Echo smart speakers found their way into many homes. Sadly, the closed Alexa ecosystem has never really improved over the years, and the new Alexa+ features require a subscription. If you have an old second-generation Echo Dot lying in a drawer, slowly gathering dust, then it's worth pulling it out, because it can now be far more useful. Some clever people have figured out how to jailbreak the Echo Dot 2, and there are a ton of community projects that have sprung up to take advantage of the smart speaker's hardware without the need for Alexa. One such project is EchoMuse. EchoMuse is an open-source project that converts an Echo Dot 2 into a voice satellite for Home Assistant. It uses the hardware of the Echo Dot to capture your spoken commands, but the processing happens through your Home Assistant voice pipeline rather than in Amazon's cloud. The responses are then sent back to the Echo Dot to play through its speaker. It means you can use your own wake word and issue commands to Home Assistant directly through your Echo Dot. You can turn on your lights, turn down your heating, or play music just like with a standard Echo, but everything can happen locally without relying on cloud services. There are other projects that can do similar things for other smart speakers, such as the Google Home Mini. Amazon Kindle Jailbreaking an old Kindle can make it more useful than a new one The Kindle is a clear example of perfectly usable hardware being abandoned by its manufacturer and rendered mostly useless. Amazon dropped support for many older Kindle models, including my old fourth-generation Kindle, robbing them of many of the most useful features. I can no longer purchase, rent, or download books from the Kindle Store, use the Send to Kindle feature, or even re-register my Kindle if I need to factory reset it. Thankfully, by jailbreaking my Kindle, I can keep using it. In fact, it's now far more useful than it ever was. The popular KOReader software gives me far more control over how my eBooks look and supports far more formats. I've also been able to make my Kindle do things I could never do before, from acting as a package tracker to showing me who is at the front door. Canon PowerShot cameras Give your old point-and-shoot superpowers Credit: Canon It wasn't always the case that we constantly carried a high-quality camera in our pockets. Early phones didn't include cameras at all, and when they started to appear, the quality initially wasn't great. That's why many of us still have old point-and-shoot cameras in our junk drawers. If you have an old Canon compact camera, you may be surprised at what you can do with it. There's an open-source project called the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) that you can load from a memory card and run alongside Canon's own software. CHDK gives your old camera capabilities that it never had originally. One of the biggest features is that you can use your point-and-shoot camera to shoot RAW. The RAW format retains significantly more sensor information, meaning that when you come to edit your photos using software such as Lightroom, you have far more data to work with. CHDK can also unlock long exposure times for night photography or light trails, provide interval shooting controls so you can use your old Canon camera to create stunning time-lapse videos, and even enable motion detection for wildlife photography. Amazon Dash buttons A device designed for one job can do many Credit: Amazon The Amazon Dash button was a strange product. It was a Wi-Fi-connected button that you could use to re-order a specific product from Amazon with a single press. For example, you could stick a Dash button next to your washing machine and order more detergent by pressing the button. Amazon stopped selling the buttons and disabled their purchasing capability, but the hardware can still be useful. Using open-source software such as Dasshio, you can use an Amazon Dash button to trigger your own smart home scenes or automations without using Amazon's cloud. Your single-purpose button can become a true smart button that you can use for whatever you want. Your junk drawer may have more useful hardware than you think These are far from the only products that are worth keeping thanks to the open-source community. Before you throw an old device away, it's worth checking to see if people are putting that device to new use. You may be surprised by what your old tech can do.