Olimex is building a lightweight alternative to Home Assistant that runs on hardware costing just €20 ($22). The Olimex HoT (Home of Things) project targets users who want basic smart home functionality without the steep learning curve and resource requirements of full-featured platforms like Home Assistant, which typically needs 2GB to 4GB of RAM. The HoT system runs comfortably on just 128MB of RAM and 128MB of flash storage.
At the heart of the system is the T113-OLinuXino board, built around an Allwinner T113-S3 SoC with dual Arm Cortex-A7 cores running at 1.2 GHz. The board includes 128MB DDR3 memory, 128MB SPI flash, a microSD slot for logging, 10/100Mbps Ethernet with optional PoE, WiFi 4, Bluetooth 4.2, and a USB Type-A port for optional Zigbee, Thread, or Matter connectivity. Power comes via USB-C, and the board supports a LiPo battery for UPS functionality. The software stack runs OpenWrt with preinstalled packages for Python 3, PHP 8.0, nginx, and the Mosquitto MQTT broker.
For IoT nodes, Olimex recommends their existing ESP32-C6-EVB board, which packs four relay outputs, four opto-isolated digital inputs, and connectivity via WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0 LE, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter. The nodes run ESPHome firmware and communicate with the HoT server over MQTT. The web interface includes a setup wizard for network configuration and user creation, followed by a dashboard displaying sensor data and toggle controls for relays.
The project was presented at FOSDEM 2026 by Olimex CEO Tsvetan Usunov. While the software has not been publicly released yet, the GitHub repository contains PDF schematics. The team plans to complete the first release by TuxCon in May 2026. One current limitation is that the RTL8723BS WiFi driver only supports monitoring mode, requiring an external USB WiFi dongle during development.
