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.
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 :-)