Image: u/ginesjunior11 on Reddit · The game stick plugged in behind the TV
A $20 retro game stick turned into a Home Assistant TV panel
A cheap Game Stick Lite 4K HDMI console now boots Alpine Linux from microSD and works as a Home Assistant display over MQTT, with alerts, a family calendar, a photo frame and text-to-speech through the TV. Built with Claude Code; the repo is a step-by-step guide with prompts.
Credits
- Reddit poster ginesjunior11 Source ↗
- Repository account ginesjunior11 Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
Cheap "Game Stick Lite 4K" HDMI consoles hide a small ARM computer. This one now boots Alpine Linux from its microSD card and sits behind the TV as a tiny home server and Home Assistant display: about 40 MQTT entities, a dashboard built from Home Assistant data, a family calendar with weather, a ticker for alerts and a red card that switches the TV to the stick's input for important ones, text-to-speech through HDMI, a Samba photo frame and a Tailscale exit node. Nothing is flashed, so the original card turns it back into a console. It was built with Claude Code, and the repo is a step-by-step guide of prompts rather than code to download.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: I turned a $20 retro game stick into a Home Assistant TV panel: alerts, family calendar, photo frameReddit poster: ginesjunior11Posted
The maker's post listing what the stick does.
- The code: github.comRepository account: ginesjunior11
The prompt guide for turning a game stick into the server and TV panel.
- Reddit: My smallest homelab node: a $20 retro game stick running Alpine Linux, Tailscale and a dasReddit poster: ginesjunior11Posted
- Reddit: ESP32-C6 as a USB Wi-Fi bridge for a Linux game stick with no network (PPP over USB CDC + Reddit poster: ginesjunior11Posted