We turned a spare PC into a café's brain with Home Assistant

Last reviewed: 21 July 2026

A Sydney café wanted a live camera feed, background music and digital menu screens, and the commercial AV quote for it made their eyes water. We did the lot for the small business on one repurposed PC running Home Assistant, free software, and it kept running when their internet didn't. The venue stays anonymous, but this was a real, paid job, not a demo.

The brief

A small café wanted three things running on the floor:

• A live camera view they could glance at from the counter and the office.
• Background music through the speakers, controlled from a phone, not a CD player behind the till.
• Digital menu screens on the wall they could update themselves instead of reprinting boards.

The commercial AV quotes for that ran into the thousands, with a proprietary box and a support contract for each piece. We already knew the smart-home tooling would do all of it on one machine.

One box, one UPS

The whole system ran on Home Assistant OS installed on a repurposed desktop PC, an old office tower that would otherwise have gone to e-waste. From that one box:

• The camera feed streamed straight into a Home Assistant dashboard, visible at the counter and the back office, with no cloud subscription.
• Background music ran off Spotify, cast to a set of Chromecast speakers, controlled from a phone. Change the playlist without leaving the counter.
• The digital menu screens on the wall were driven by a cheap Raspberry Pi running a full-screen dashboard. Update the menu in one place and the screens follow.

The detail that makes it commercial-grade rather than a hobby build: it all ran through a single UPS, a battery backup. Cafés get power flickers; the fridge kicks in, someone trips a breaker. Without the UPS, every flicker would reboot the PC and the Pi, and the menus and music would drop out mid-service. With it, a flicker is a non-event, everything rides through and stays up.

Why local-first mattered

The café's internet was, like a lot of small venues, not the most reliable thing in the building. That's exactly why running it all locally was the point.

• The camera view and the menu screens are served from the PC on the local network, so they keep working with the internet completely down.
• Only the music actually needs the internet (Spotify is a streaming service). Everything else is local, so an NBN outage costs you the playlist, not the menus and not the cameras.

A cloud-based version of the same setup would have gone dark every time the connection dropped, which, mid-service, is exactly when you can't be fiddling with it. Local-first means the internet is a bonus, not a dependency.

What it shows

Here is the same job, off the shelf versus the way we built it:

• Software. Off the shelf, per-seat licences plus a support contract. What we used, Home Assistant OS, free.
• Server. Off the shelf, a proprietary AV controller. What we used, a repurposed office PC.
• Menu screens. Off the shelf, commercial digital-signage boxes. What we used, a Raspberry Pi running a dashboard.
• Music. Off the shelf, dedicated audio hardware. What we used, Spotify cast to Chromecast speakers.
• Power protection. Off the shelf, often skipped. What we used, one UPS across the lot.

None of this is exotic. It's the same local-first smart-home tech people run at home, pointed at a business problem, and it scales down to a small venue's budget while being more resilient than the cloud version, because it doesn't fall over when the connection does.

The lesson for any small business: before you sign up for a stack of monthly subscriptions and proprietary boxes, ask whether one local machine and some open tooling does the job. Often it does, for a fraction of the cost, and it keeps working when the internet doesn't.

The short version

We ran a café's live camera, background music and digital menu screens off one repurposed PC running Home Assistant OS. Menus on a Raspberry Pi, music via Spotify to Chromecast speakers, everything on a single UPS so a power flicker didn't take the floor down. Local-first smart-home tech scales to small business cheaply, and it keeps working when the internet drops, which is the whole point.

A de-identified account of a real job; the exact gear varies with the site, and a commercial install should be sized and cabled for the venue.

Running a café, shop or studio and wondering if one local box could replace a stack of subscriptions? That's exactly the kind of setup we do. No lock-in, no upsell to gear you don't need. Tell us what you want running and we'll map it out.