This project is still in the experimental/proof-of-concept phase. One part of it is the desire to reuse old hardware; the hardware I bought new for this project is as follows:
At the time of the conversion to the wall server the machine was 11 years old. In fact, the machine was holding up pretty well with these upgrades. Unfortunately, when I upgraded to Windows 10 (from Windows 7) there was no longer driver support for Intel HD 3000 graphics, which is what this processor uses. It was still able to watch videos, but for rendering graphics (gaming, Unity engine) it was unable to perform. Before Windows 10 I had been using it to play Minecraft at decent frame rates (considering), so I do enjoy that it now hosts a Minecraft server with success.
Another part of it is that microcomputers, such as Raspberry Pi units, were not readily available due to the silicon shortages present in 2021 and 2022, when these ideas were being incepted and executed.
Third is the allure of running the oldest and most under-specced hardware possible (within reason) to see just what it can do. I prefer to find both the lower and upper limits of projects. I want to know how powerful a Minecraft server machine actually has to be. That said, I fully intend to replace this machine with a third iteration of the home server. As that happens this hardware will be handed down to a vegetable garden. It will live as an automatic watering system, and I have aspirations to install probes into the soil to govern when the system automatically waters. There will also be wide-angle cameras to record footage that will be edited into time-lapse plant-growing videos.
Lastly, I will talk about power consumption. Running my Plex media server off of a machine that pulls ~14 watts at idle is much more economical than the previous version, which was an unlocked and overclockable Intel I7-8700K chip that was pulling more like 65 watts at idle. Also, the laptop battery doubles as a UPS, giving the comptuer about 5 hours of run time in the event of a power outage. It can also be mounted right on the wooden backboard with the hardware itself.
I wrote a bash script to check if the computer was discharging battery or not, and if it was to monitor the remaining battery life. Once the charge drops below 50% the server properly shuts itself down rather than abruptly losing power when the battery is completely discharged. In any case it logs its hourly readouts to one or another file, depending on if it is actively shutting down or not.