My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

Summary

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It’s a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server# After running for over a year, my solar-powered iPhone 8 has processed 83,418 OCR requests and 48GB of images using nothing but Apple’s Vision framework and renewable energy. Most people toss their old iPhones in a drawer when they upgrade. Me? I turned mine into a 24/7 OCR server that’s been saving me $7-10/month while running completely off-grid. And yes, before you ask - I could have just run this on my Mac like a normal person, but where’s the fun in that? TL;DR - Technical Summary# The Setup: iPhone 8 running SwiftUI app with Apple Vision OCR EcoFlow River 2 Pro (768Wh) + 220W solar panel Mini PC handling web services and API routing Tailscale network connecting everything Performance Stats: 83,418 total OCR requests processed 48GB of image data handled 1000+ requests on busy days 76% battery health after 1+ year of 24/7 operation $7-10/month electricity savings vs grid power Key Learnings: Apple Vision framework is surprisingly accurate for local OCR iPhone 8 hardware is incredibly reliable for server workloads Solar power works great with 8+ hours of sun most of the year Local processing beats cloud services for privacy and cost at scale Why Would You Even Do This?# Short Answer: I don’t know, I love renewable energy and I love to tinker. The Logical Approach# So I’ve got this image-heavy personal project that chews through hundreds of images daily, categorizing them automatically. It’s been happily humming along for over a year now. Any reasonable person would just run the OCR processing on their Mac - Apple’s Vision framework works great on macOS after all (maybe slightly better even than on iOS). The “Me” Approach# But I’m not logical. I see a perfectly good iPhone 8 and think: “You know what this needs? A second career as a solar-powered image processing servant." (If this sounds familiar, it’s because I have a track record of giving old devices second lives - my Kindle Paperwhite is ...