I have a spare Z69 4K Android TV box here and no use for it at the moment. It served for a few years as exactly what is was sold for, later I flashed Kodi on it for a while and after that it served as a WFH RDP Client for another while with Armbian flashed on it.
The box has a S909X SoC, 3 GB RAM and 32 GB Flash, 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, LAN, USB and HDMI.
I have a homelab already and I wondered if I could use it as a Zwave or Zigbee gateway maybe. But this does not seem to be possible in “software” only. I thought because we have overlaps in Frequencies between WiFi and Zwave (~860/~900 MHz range) and Zigbee (2.4 GHz range) it might be possible on Software, but I was not able to find such projects.
So I wonder… if you had this thing sitting around being useless, do you have any clever ideas what you would use it for?
It would be sad to scrap it since it is working fine.
With Armbian installed, you can offload services that require to be always active on the box and create an “on-off” schedule for the homelab. This will save quite some electricity usage especially if your homelab is beefy
That is what I did until recently with my other Box that has an AMD T40E… but then it had to run Nextcloud that I wanted to move from an external hoster to my Home and it was just too slow to be usable. So my Homelab (just a MiniPC) has to run anyway 24/7 for the family and it has all the other Containers as well. To save a bit of power on that one, the Minecraft Server (that even in idle consumes quite some CPU cycles) can be turned on / off by the family via a button in Home Assistant :-)
If you want to use Zigbee or Zwave you simply need a USB dongle for that. Search for “Sonoff Zigbee Stick” if you want to see what that looks like. As you are already running Armbian it should be easy to install HomeAssistant with ZHA or zigbee2mqtt on it.
It could have been a cheap entry into the Z* topic, that is why I asked specifically for those 2. I have no real need currently for Z* devices at the moment, but I am curious and might start with a USB dongle in the future… but that one then can go directly into my Homelab anyway. Thanks for the suggestion :-)
weatherproof video projection for a large outdoor wall? smart mirror driver? ridiculous water fountain controller? jukebox with visualizer?
Hmm… Smart Mirror like Magic Mirror? It’s the first time I hear this… looks really interesting! I will look into this. I always wondered where to put a panel you easily see, but is not intrusive to show some information you should know for the upcoming day… Smart Mirrors sounds like they tick all the boxes!
Host a Lemmy instance on it :)
Haha :-) I was seriously considering hosting my own KBin or Lemmy Instance on my Homelab for a bit, but then I figured it would be just for fun (which is not a bad thing) and will just consume electricity and space for something I use once or twice a day and I use almost exclusively alone. So it won’t even contribute to the community. I am not even sure if it would be fast enough, but that sounds like a nice Sunday afternoon project to just prove that it works (or doesn’t) for fun :-)
hodgepodge k8s cluster node!
I always have the feeling I should know k8s more, although I am sure I do not need it. Can you mix Architectures in k8s Clusters? Like my Homelab (x64) has the Pi-Hole and the Z69 Box (ARM) takes over with a standby Pi-Hole if the homelab goes down? Or do k8s Clusters need to be uniform regarding CPU architecture?
you can mix and match, just need to mark your workloads accordingly, I totally recommend playing around with it as it’s pretty cool
except for all the yaml
I think I’d bring it a thriftstore. (Or donate it to somebody that could use it ;) )
I’m having the same issue with and RPi 1, 2 and 2 bananapies. (R1 and R2) I’m not sure if the BPi R2 is good enough for a kodi setup, the rest is to light.
That’s a good Idea too. If I find nothing else, before it sits here any longer, I will ask around my friends and colleagues and ultimately it will go to a thriftstore. I do not like to throw away stuff that still works, so this is a really good idea. Thank you :-)
I could put it to use ;)
In seriousness, have you consider using it as a DNS filter (Pi-Hole) or Samba share (32GB)?
I also could recommend running wireguard/openvpn, and Port Forward to the outside would for a secure connecton.
