I've been using a Raspberry Pi as a home server, and it's been holding up amazingly well, given everything I've thrown at it:
- The excellent Home Assistant, for unifying across Homekit and Google Home and tracking historical temperatures and a couple of automations. The RPi has Bluetooth built in, so I can capture the data from a few Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometers running custom firmware (https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer) without a 802.15.4 bridge or similar.
- An AirPlay to Google Cast bridge, mainly for listening to Overcast or the occasional YouTube video on Google speakers (without subscribing to Youtube Premium/Music)
- A SMB server, for file storage and potential Time Machine backups (but I don't currently have enough storage, and locally attached SSDs are just hard to beat in terms of performance)
- A DLNA server, for watching photos and videos on my TV
- Tailscale, for the occasional use of my home connection as a VPN when traveling (really glad to be having symmetric fiber for this!)
- Caddy, as a frontend for everything web facing, to benefit from its excellent Let's Encrypt integration for automatic certificate requests and renewals
Most of this is running in Docker containers and configured via Ansible, so that if the microSD card burns out (or I botch an OS update), I can just flash a new one with an empty image and recover from there.
- The excellent Home Assistant, for unifying across Homekit and Google Home and tracking historical temperatures and a couple of automations. The RPi has Bluetooth built in, so I can capture the data from a few Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometers running custom firmware (https://github.com/pvvx/ATC_MiThermometer) without a 802.15.4 bridge or similar.
- An AirPlay to Google Cast bridge, mainly for listening to Overcast or the occasional YouTube video on Google speakers (without subscribing to Youtube Premium/Music)
- A SMB server, for file storage and potential Time Machine backups (but I don't currently have enough storage, and locally attached SSDs are just hard to beat in terms of performance)
- A DLNA server, for watching photos and videos on my TV
- Tailscale, for the occasional use of my home connection as a VPN when traveling (really glad to be having symmetric fiber for this!)
- Caddy, as a frontend for everything web facing, to benefit from its excellent Let's Encrypt integration for automatic certificate requests and renewals
Most of this is running in Docker containers and configured via Ansible, so that if the microSD card burns out (or I botch an OS update), I can just flash a new one with an empty image and recover from there.