Don’t throw away that old Kindle gathering dust in your drawer. With its high-contrast E-ink display and incredible battery life, it is the perfect candidate for a low-power home dashboard. In this post, I’ll show you how I turned a Kindle Paperwhite 2 into a 2-hour refreshing dashboard powered by a Raspberry Pi 5.
In my previous post, I shared how to install Home Assistant OS (HAOS) inside a KVM on a Raspberry Pi 5. While having a powerful local server is great, it brings up a major question: How do you access it securely from the outside?
For this setup, I wanted to achieve two specific goals:
The answer to both is Tailscale.
After successfully setting up a Home Assistant OS (HAOS) VM on my Raspberry Pi 5 (KVM/libvirt approach), I wanted to test a minimal Debian 12 ARM64 VM for InfluxDB and Grafana.
Since I use Raspberry Pi 5 as a virtual machine (VM) host for Home Assistant OS (HAOS) in KVM, I want a system that is simple, stable, and reliable.
After repeated microSD drawbacks, I selected the Samsung 870 EVO SSD 500GB via USB3 over my previous Raspberry Pi 128GB microSD U2 for system storage.
This guide shows how to pass through the SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus to a Home Assistant OS (HAOS) virtual machine running on Raspberry Pi 5 using KVM/libvirt. This allows you to use Zigbee devices directly within your virtualized Home Assistant setup.
Running Home Assistant directly on a Raspberry Pi is the default, but what if you want KVM virtualization on the same Pi 5? Virtualizing HAOS gives you snapshots, easy backup, and the ability to run other services alongside it. This guide walks through the full setup — from installing libvirt and KVM on a Pi 5 to getting Home Assistant accessible on your LAN.
A Raspberry Pi WiFi Extender is a cheap and power efficient way of increasing the total range of your WiFi Network. In my case I needed to extend a WiFi coverage within the same LAN (bridge mode from Ethernet to WiFi).
I have found a working shortcut 😎 to create an access point following a GitHub project so I didn’t need to follow instructions from raspberrypi.org page – Using the Raspberry Pi as an access point to share an internet connection (bridge).