Treczoks

I stand corrected. Thank you!

There is an easily hackable and cheap device from IKEA by the name of “VINDRIKTNING”. There are YT videos on how to wifi-enable that thing and integrate it into home automation services.

If you don’t care for the looks, just put it down where needed, and fix it to whatever is around with cable ties.

I did the same in my daughters shared accommodation. Officially they had wifi in all the student rooms, but my daughters room basically had no reception, so I ran a cable from the other end of the flat where the router was down the staircase into her room for a local AP. When she moved out, it was a quick job with a pair of pliers to get it out again.

Got a bunch of RPIs, some of them retired.

One of the active ones runs a MediaWiki engine (if it detects my home wifi on startup, it acts as a mirror slave to the master installation on the server, if not, it opens a wifi with my home wifi’s credentials and offers the wiki as read-only).

Another one runs a DB that controls a number of ESP8266 clients controlling lights, motors, and sensors.

I use “radicale” as calendar server for the family. Thunderbird can talk to it directly, on Androidd, I use DAVX5 to sync them.

I’m so old, when I started, software was either part of the operating system, or we had to get it for free, as source to compile it locally. Yes, there were commercial software packages for some applications, but most of the everyday stuff (editor, file browser, file transfer programs, multi-user online games and their clients) was open source. And many of us contributed, me included. I wrote Gobelin, an NNTP news reader/filter/aggregator, and Connector, a frontend for multi-user online games.