Hand-Me-Down Homelab

Old hardware. Real house. An AI runs it.

Learn to work with an AI by watching one run a real house. This series shows an AI assistant doing real jobs on hand-me-down hardware, including the times it gets it wrong and how that gets caught.

Hand-Me-Down Homelab turns the computers in your closet into a smart home that runs itself: a 2009 Mac Mini, a 2012 Mac Mini running Proxmox, a handful of Raspberry Pis, an N100 mini PC and one GPU box, with an AI assistant that builds, documents and fixes it.

Step-by-step builds for tinkerers who know a little Linux:
• Proxmox, Pi-hole, a reverse proxy, your own certificate authority and Tailscale
• Home Assistant: Zigbee, mmWave presence, dashboards and WLED lighting
• Frigate AI cameras and a Raspberry Pi speed camera
• Watching your network: Suricata, Kismet, OpenWebRX
• Local AI on your own GPU: Ollama, Open WebUI, images, video and music
• An AI as your sysadmin — and every time something broke

Real hardware, real failures, real fixes.