Home Assistant is a free, open-source smart home platform designed to centralize control of all your IoT devices in one place. It emphasizes local control and privacy, meaning it runs on your own hardware without relying on the cloud or external servers.
At our makerspace, we utilised a retired 2014 Dell Laptop Latitude E6540 with 16GB ram, 256 SSD, i7-4810MQ CPU@2.80GHz for Home Assistant (HA). Although the laptop is already 12 years old (at the time of this page was written in 2026), it is more than capable (overkilled in fact) of running HA, and it turned out to be an excellent machine for HA because of its battery/power management in system BIOS with low power consumption and UPS.
HA could be installed as a dedicated operation system (HAOS), but we chose to install Ubuntu 22.04 server instead, and running HA in a docker container. This way, the machine (Ubuntu Linux server) could host many services and could install/join the MakerClubQUT's Tailscale network for remote management.