Project ideas

Before you tighten the first screw, let’s talk about the reward. A mini-machine isn’t a gadget you build for the joy of building, it’s a foundation on which you’ll lay concrete, useful, sometimes downright jaw-dropping projects. Here’s an overview to get you excited. None of these examples is out of reach: each one runs on the little box we’re going to configure together.

Run your home, home automation

Turn the mini-PC into the brain of your connected home with software like Home Assistant. Lights, heating, blinds, cameras, plugs, sensors: everything is centralized, and above all at home, without depending on a manufacturer’s cloud that could shut down tomorrow.

The real fun comes from scenarios: “at 10 p.m., lower the heating, close the blinds, and turn off everything except the night light”; “if a camera detects motion while I’m away, alert me.” Once it’s hooked up to your agent, you describe the scenario in plain language and it writes the automation for you.

Your own media platform

Set up a media server (Jellyfin, for instance): your own Netflix, with your movies and shows, accessible on the TV, the phone, the tablet, at home or on the go. Add a dashboard that aggregates your wishlist, posters, ratings, exactly the kind of project an agent builds with you in a weekend.

Develop for real: app, backend, site

This is the heart of the matter. The mini-PC + the agent is a complete development workshop:

• A site: landing page, blog, docs, portfolio. You build it, and you put it online on your own domain (that’s exactly what this guide does, it is a site served from a mini-machine).
• A web app: a tool for you or your team: task tracking, dashboard, mini-CRM, converter, whatever you want.
• A backend / an API: a service that runs continuously: it receives requests, talks to a database, returns results. The invisible building block behind apps.

Dashboards that put YOUR data to work

Here’s a use that gets underestimated and quickly becomes addictive: the custom dashboard. A page of your own, gathering at a glance what matters to you, and that you won’t find in any off-the-shelf app, because it only exists for you.

• Your personal finances: aggregate your accounts, subscriptions, expenses, visualize where the money goes, spot the leaks. Your figures stay at home, not on some fintech’s server.
• Your projects, personal and professional: a dashboard that tracks progress, deadlines, tasks, pulling the info from wherever it already lives.
• Your quantified life: sport, reading, screen time, the home’s energy usage… what you measure, you can display and understand.

The secret is to plug in your data sources. And there, two tools change everything:

Concretely: you describe the dashboard you want, you give the agent access to your sources (API or MCP), and it assembles the page. Your data, long scattered and inert, finally becomes readable and useful: on a machine you control.

The real superpower: automations

This is where the always-on machine really comes into its own. An automation is a task that happens on its own, continuously, while you live your life. A few telling examples:

• Automated monitoring: every morning, a script collects your industry’s news, summarizes it, and delivers the essentials.
• A recurring report: your figures, your metrics, your weekly review, generated and sent without you lifting a finger.
• A watchdog: it monitors a service, a site, a sensor, and alerts you at the slightest issue.
• A sorter: it files your documents, tidies your screenshots, archives your files according to your rules.

And the level above: these automations entrusted to an agent. Where a dumb script follows a fixed recipe, an agent reasons: it reads, decides, adapts. An automatic code review every morning, a smart response to an event… We dig into this in Agents running on the mini-PC.

All of this, from your phone

Because the machine is on your private network, it follows you everywhere. You can run your workshop from your smartphone: send a task to an agent with a simple message, check an automation, consult an app, from the subway or the couch. Claude Code can do this on its own: with Remote Control, the Claude app for iOS and Android picks up a session started on the machine, which keeps running at home, and Channels (in preview) pass it your Telegram, Discord or iMessage messages. We set all this up in Working remotely and Hermes & OpenClaw.

And you can combine

The best part is that these blocks assemble. A home automation that notifies your agent, which triggers an automation, which sends you a summary on your phone, generated by a local model… You’re not building a project: you’re building yourself an ecosystem. And it grows with you.