Turned an old laptop and spare TV into a self hosted kitchen dashboard and home server
| I had an old Lenovo laptop and a spare 40 inch TV, so I repurposed them into a small home server and kitchen dashboard. The laptop runs Ubuntu Server. The TV sits near the kitchen and displays a local dashboard through a Mi Box running TV Bro. Current setup: Ubuntu Server Docker AdGuard Home for DNS, DHCP, and network wide ad blocking Tailscale for remote access Samba file share backed by a 6TB external SSD Custom Python dashboard Google Calendar integration Five day weather Two week family calendar Upcoming events Local DFW events Vegetarian recipe page QR codes for opening events and recipes on a phone Rotating display between dashboard, events, and recipes I originally tried MagicMirror, but moved to a simple custom app because I wanted tighter control over the layout. The dashboard is just plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a Python backend. The best part is that it is actually useful. It is not just sitting in a rack doing nothing. The family sees it every day in the kitchen. Claude helped me build and troubleshoot a lot of it, especially the Python server, layout fixes, AdGuard setup, and moving away from MagicMirror. Biggest lesson was to keep the setup simple and avoid clever configs. Still a work in progress, but I am pretty happy with how much use I got out of old hardware. [link] [comments] |