5 overlooked Home Assistant accessories hiding in your junk drawer

Published Aug 13, 2026, 8:45 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. Building a smart home can be an expensive process. You need something that can control your smart home as well as all the devices that you want to control. You don't always need to buy new smart home devices; you may already have some useful Home Assistant accessories gathering dust in your junk drawer. A smart security camera Even an old phone can do the job Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek Smart cameras can be very useful tools for your smart home, but you don't always have to buy them new. You may already own devices that can do the job. The most obvious candidates are old webcams. If you ever bought a dedicated webcam for your PC, it may still be lying around in a box somewhere. If your Home Assistant installation can access USB video devices, you can connect an old USB webcam directly, or connect it to a Raspberry Pi and make the camera stream available to Home Assistant; the FFmpeg integration explicitly supports USB cameras on Linux. A less obvious option for a Home Assistant security camera is an old phone. Even older smartphones may have better rear cameras than some cheap security cameras. I use an old Samsung Galaxy S8 running the IP Webcam app as a smart home camera. A Home Assistant voice satellite Your junk drawer may be hiding a free smart speaker Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek If you have an old Android phone in your drawer, you may be able to use it in a way that you might not necessarily expect. Since the Home Assistant 2026.3 update, the Home Assistant Companion app for Android now supports using your phone as a voice satellite. Using on-device wake word detection, you can use one of three predefined wake words to open Assist on your phone even if your phone is locked. By saying "Okay Nabu," "Hey Jarvis," or "Hey Mycroft," you can wake Assist and then give spoken commands to control your smart home. Responses can play through your phone's speakers, effectively turning your old phone into a smart speaker. While the detection isn't as consistent as a dedicated smart speaker, it can work well if you're not too far from your phone when you start speaking to it. You can do the same thing with an Android tablet, too. A smart home dashboard Control and monitor your smart home If you're a fan of smart home dashboards that you can use to monitor and control your smart home, then you may already have everything you need in your junk drawer. The most obvious candidates are old tablets; even if a tablet is too old to run the Home Assistant app or open Home Assistant in the browser, there are options such as VNC that can let you use the tablet as a dashboard. Less obvious devices you can use include old eReaders such as Kindles. If you jailbreak your Kindle, you can use it as a simple E-Ink dashboard that can display information about your smart home. You can even turn an old Kindle into a slow-refresh security camera monitor. Even if your tablet is broken, you may be able to use it in your smart home. I ripped the display out of an old iPad 2 with cracked glass, and it's now put to use as a "now playing" display for whatever we're watching on TV. There are other devices that can make useful dashboards if you’re able to jailbreak them. For example, you can jailbreak some models of Echo Show smart displays or repurpose Meta Portal devices and use these as smart home dashboards. A smart home remote An old controller can turn off your lights Credit: Andrew Heinzman / How-To Geek Automation can make your smart home react without you having to do anything. Motion sensors can make your lights turn on when you enter a room, presence detection can make your music follow you around the house, and a bed sensor can power down your home when you go to bed. Sometimes, however, you may need to control your smart home devices manually. Smart home dashboards aren't the only option; you can use smart home remotes, too. While you can buy dedicated smart home remotes or smart buttons, you may find you already have what you need. An old USB or compatible Bluetooth controller can work as a remote control. You can map the different buttons to different commands, and use it to turn on lighting scenes, control your media playback, or tell your robot vacuum where to go. Other old devices that can be repurposed as remote controls include wireless keyboards or numeric keypads. If you have old IR remotes lying around, you can use an IR receiver to allow these remotes to control your smart home. A smart home speaker Get audio announcements in more places Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek Not every speaker in your home needs to be a smart speaker. Just because you can't talk to a speaker doesn't mean it can't be useful. Being able to play music or spoken announcements on speakers around your home can be really useful. You can hook up old stereo systems that already offer compatible wireless connectivity, while Bluetooth speakers can be used with a connected device such as a Raspberry Pi or ESP32. If you have an old stereo that isn't wireless, you can connect it to Home Assistant using a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 with a digital-to-analog converter. If you have old PC speakers, you can also hook these up to a connected device. The more speakers you have around your smart home, the more places you can play music and announcements. Don't buy new tech without checking your old tech Building a smart home can be addictive; there's always another device you might want to add. You don't always have to buy something new. If you check your junk drawer, you may find that you can put a lot of what you find to good use.