The computing landscape is shifting towards lower-powered processors that give better efficiency while still providing enough compute power for advanced tasks. But if you wanted to use Arm-based devices in your home lab, the only real options were SBCs like the Raspberry Pi.

Now, these efficient CPUs are appearing in NAS enclosures, mini PCs, and servers, and they're perfect for a bunch of home lab experimentsyou might want to run. The bonus is that they use little power most of the time, so your power bill won't suffer while you have a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (or X or X Plus) mini PC or three on the go.

Home Assistant automation hub

It just makes sense to use an efficient CPU for this

Home Assistant is one of my favorite things to self-host, and while my instance currently runs on an Intel mini PC, I wouldn't hesitate to switch to an Arm-based model. Whether you've got Windows on Arm or Linux running as your host OS, you'll need to download the appropriate HAOS image file from Home Assistant, and mount it using your virtual machine manager of choice, or Hyper-V if you go that route.

You could also go for the Docker container installation, which means you won't be able to use the Add-ons store for HA. You'll still be able to link the same projects to Home Assistant, but it'll be a little more involved, as you'll be managing the container stack rather than the supervisor included in the full OS version. Once installed, you can begin the process of wresting control of your smart home back from the big conglomerates and taking a local-first approach to your devices.

Jellyfin Media Server

We love this media server and it has official ARM64 Docker builds

Jellyfin is our favorite home media server for many reasons, including its hardware transcoding with no additional fees. It's fantastic for serving your personal media library across your network (and beyond), including letting you create virtual movie nights with SyncPlay. The UI is uncluttered, there are a handful of clients you can choose from, including mobile ones, and the whole installation process is relatively painless.

You are limited to using Arm64 Docker image builds if you go this route, but it's hard to find a home lab that doesn't already have a container stack. Plus, learning how to manipulate the stack, images, and Dockerfiles is a more interesting experience when it's something like Jellyfin that entertains at the same time.

Nextcloud

Roll your own self-hosted cloud empire

Turning your home lab into a self-hosted cloud replacement is something many of us have done already, and Nextcloud is one of the best options for doing so. It can pretty much replace Microsoft 365, with productivity tools, and more in the Nextcloud App Store. The Docker container is the quickest way to go; double-check you're using the Arm64 image, not the x86 one.

The power of the Snapdragon X Elite will be useful while editing files, and the low power usage is great for keeping your server on all the time for uninterrupted data access. It's got the capability for server-side and end-to-end encryption so your data is safe at rest and while being transferred, and you know that it's not being scanned to train AI models.

Kubernetes cluster

Low-powered, low cost mini PCs are great for K3s

Using K3s on Raspberry Pi devices to make clustered deployments has long been a feature of the home lab, but there's no reason you shouldn't scale that up to a group of Snapdragon X Elite mini PCs. You'll be able to add more services, containers, and workloads, while knowing your platform is more stable and that the storage device you're using is more robust than a microSD card.

Once set up, you can deploy a bunch of useful containers, like Pi-hole for DNS-level blocking, Uptime Kuma to manage your cluster's availability, Nginx Proxy Manager for remote access, and the ultimate visualization combo of Grafana and Prometheus.

Self-host your password manager

Vaultwarden is one of our favorites

Bitwarden is a self-hostable password manager that is worth the effort of deploying in your home lab. It's not only to keep your hashed password vault on hardware you control, but that's a powerful argument for why. It's also because it can store your API keys and secrets, and pass them to your containers at runtime, to limit the chances of any secrets leaking.

That's also going to be a valuable workflow to learn if you want to go into many professions that handle containers, as having hardcoded plaintext secrets is about as far from best security practices as you can get.

Self-host your own Git service

Whether Forgejo or Gitea, keeping it in-house makes your code stealthy

Another worthwhile project for your home lab is to self-host your own Git repository hub. You could use Gitea or its fork, Forgejo, to keep your Git repositories on hardware you control, rather than on the sprawling cloud infrastructure of GitHub or other commercial options.

The reasoning behind that is partly to ensure your code isn't being used to train AI models, something that we're all a little bit annoyed at, but also because nothing is truly private if you're hosting it on the internet, and keeping your repositories on your low-powered Arm mini PC means it's not out in the wild. That way, you can learn about version control, secrets management, and other important aspects of your projects without running the risk of exposing those secrets accidentally.

There are plenty of uses for a Snapdragon X Elite mini PC

These are just some of the concrete projects you could use an Arm-based mini PC for, but that's not all. You could use Arm's Lumex platform for local AI, or set up Android Studio to do (mostly) native Android development, once you've swapped out the x86 emulator for one that runs on Arm. And with plenty of Linux distributions now supporting Arm's architecture, you can expand your home lab with relative ease. It won't be quite as simple as running x86 applications, but sometimes the challenge is the fun part of home labbing.