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 :-)