3 Home Assistant projects to repurpose old hardware this weekend (Sep 4-6)

Published Sep 5, 2026, 4:00 PM 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. Tech prices are going through the roof, with the high cost of RAM affecting everything from Raspberry Pis to high-end gaming PCs. The good news is that with Home Assistant, it’s often possible to repurpose old tech so that you don’t need to buy anything new. Turn an old Echo Dot into a local smart speaker Escape the Alexa ecosystem Credit: Ben Lovejoy / How-To Geek When Alexa first appeared on the scene, it seemed like this might be the way that we would control all of our smart home devices. Shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation made the idea of talking to our computers feel like the most efficient way to use them. The reality turned out to be disappointing. While Alexa is useful for basic things such as turning on lights or asking simple questions, Amazon’s locked-down ecosystem means that an Echo smart speaker today isn’t much more useful than it was when the first models launched. It’s a shame, because the hardware even in older Echo smart speakers is actually pretty solid, with microphone arrays and beamforming that can pick up voice commands even in noisy environments. Thankfully, if you have an old second-generation Echo Dot, you can break free of the shackles of Alexa and turn it into your own local smart speaker. There are several projects that let you use your Echo Dot as a local voice satellite for Home Assistant so that you can speak to Assist using your Echo without having your commands end up on Amazon’s servers. One project even allows you to run speech recognition and a small LLM directly on the device, so that much of the processing happens on the Echo rather than on your Home Assistant server. Whichever option you choose, you can do a lot more by using an Echo Dot with Home Assistant than you ever could with Alexa. Build a smart home hub from a laptop motherboard The scale model of your home is optional Credit: Reddit | u/recrafting There are plenty of options for running Home Assistant. I ran it for a couple of years on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ without any major issues, and I now run it in Proxmox on a mini PC. There are plenty of other suggestions that are often given, including running Home Assistant on an old laptop. The problem with using an old laptop is that you have to deal with issues such as maintaining battery health, high-power consumption, a mostly redundant screen, and the fact that it looks like an old laptop. One clever Home Assistant user solved this problem by ripping the motherboard out of an old laptop and running Home Assistant on it, using the laptop’s original cooling hardware along with the RAM and storage. A bare motherboard still isn't the most beautiful-looking Home Assistant server, so the user built an entire scale model of their home to house the motherboard and components. The model isn’t just for looks; it includes LEDs in the rooms to mimic the real lighting states, and an ESP32-S3 running ESPHome allows the user to talk to the house and get voice assistant responses. You don’t have to go to the same extreme of building a tiny version of your own home. However, the idea of using the components from the laptop rather than the entire laptop itself is an interesting one and might be something worth considering if you have an old computer lying around. Put abandoned hardware to good use There are plenty of tech devices that have come and gone without making much of an impact, and the Meta Portal (originally the Facebook Portal) is definitely one of them. Launched in 2018, the Portal was a line of smart displays primarily intended for video calling via Messenger or WhatsApp. By 2022, Meta ended development and sold off the remaining inventory of Portal products. For a long time, these devices were basically e-waste, but in June 2026, Meta added official Android Debug Bridge (ADB) support to the devices, allowing people to bypass many of the limitations of the locked-down Meta software and sideload their own Android apps. The upshot is that it’s now possible to do a lot with a Meta Portal. One community project uses Ava Pro, an Android platform built for Home Assistant, to turn the Meta Portal into a voice-controlled speaker for Music Assistant. Another option is Portal HA Bridge, which turns a Meta Portal into a Home Assistant device exposing screen controls, motion detection, camera streaming and more. As a result, some Home Assistant users are picking up old Portals from secondhand marketplaces. You can still find them for reasonable prices, but you might want to grab one before they become too scarce. Repurposing is one of the best things about Home Assistant I love Home Assistant for so many reasons, but the fact that you can often use it to repurpose old hardware is definitely up there. I’ve given new life to broken iPads, Echo Show devices, and old phones, saving me from having to buy new hardware.