A $10 OpenStick running a silent homelab
Original: What I run on my $10 USD OpenStick homelab
Why This Matters
Shows how minimal ARM hardware can still run practical self-hosted infrastructure.
A blogger built a silent homelab on a $10 OpenStick: 4-core ARM, 512 MB RAM, 4G modem, running Debian with AdGuard Home, CastSponsorSkip, and an AI agent via Telegram.
The OpenStick is a USB-stick-sized device that costs $10 shipped, packs a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 at 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB eMMC, Wi-Fi, a 4G modem, GPS, and a programmable LED. Passively cooled means zero fan noise. After a somewhat involved installation, it runs full Debian with systemd and Podman.
The author runs three main services. CastSponsorSkip (5–10 MB) silently kills sponsorship segments on any Google Cast device on the network. A custom fork of AdGuard Home (40 MB, blocklist-size-independent) blocks DNS queries for spyware and malware domains—currently intercepting 60% of all outbound queries from devices like smart TVs and, apparently, the washing machine.
The third service is Zeroclaw, a 64 MB AI agent harness that idles at ~3 MB RAM. The author ditched a heavier alternative (OpenClaw, 1 GB+) that kept breaking on Kubernetes. Zeroclaw connects via Telegram, so the author can query server health from remote locations with weak signal. The agent has shell access to the OpenStick only—limited blast radius by design. A pull request to add rich Telegram message support is already in progress.