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Smart TVs and home labs may not seem like they have much in common, but you'd be surprised. Your home lab can take advantage of a smart TV as a lab dashboard in place of a more traditional monitor or as a lab status monitor, but the reverse is also true. Your smart TV can absolutely benefit from your home lab in a number of different ways. Some of these benefits may be obvious, but just because they seem obvious doesn't mean they're not worth noting as advantages of connecting your home lab to your smart TV. A dedicated home media center Enjoy your Jellyfin or Plex media server from the comfort of your couch If you've built a media server into your home lab, chances are you'll want to enjoy the benefits of your media library in comfort. And that's where your smart TV comes in. Media servers like Jellyfin or Plex have Android TV apps, as well as apps for game consoles and web browser clients, in case your TV doesn't have direct access to the app. And if you don't have a media server in your home lab environment, you may want to create one using any old hardware you have lying around. A home media server allows you to stream content without a subscription, and both Plex and Jellyfin offer ad-supported live TV and movie streaming on their free versions of the app. So you can also enjoy content you don't personally own as well. This is probably the most obvious benefit of connecting your smart TV to your home lab, but it's a major one. After all, media servers are some of the most common home lab projects, for good reason. Test and use self-hosted apps If you're in the app hosting or development community, that is Dashboards like Heimdall or Dashy can easily be accessed by a web browser, which is a built-in feature of just about every smart TV these days. And from there, you can launch your Nextcloud, Immich, or Proxmox app directly onto your TV. You can easily access your self-hosted office suite, photo library, or virtual machines directly from your TV. This is also a way to turn your smart TV into a home media center, as self-hosted dashboards can work with media servers like Jellyfin or Plex. Alternatively, if you're on the app development side of things, you might need to test those apps on a variety of devices, and a smart TV can be a great option for testing out your app compatibility. And putting your app-in-progress on a self-hosting site is just one more way to utilize your home lab for development and some basic quality assurance. Control other smart devices with voice commands If you've got more than just a smart TV in your home lab, it can become your main command center Most smart home devices are controlled by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or Matter, allowing you to connect them all and use your smart TV as a command hub. You can automate routines for movie nights, change the lighting to set colors or brightness for specific times of day, and trigger various reminders. You can even control your robot vacuum cleaner through your smart TV if you'd like. Whether your smart home devices are intended for home lab use or just personal lifestyle controls, setting up your smart TV as a command hub for all of your smart plugs, smart bulbs, voice assistants, AI agents, and robot vacuum cleaners can be a serious benefit to your home lab. After all, you can set specific lighting and theme music for your mad scientist lab times, if you really want. Make your smart TV smarter All you need is an SBC Smart TVs come with plenty of useful apps installed, and if you've got a Roku TV or Android TV-capable model, you've got even more apps you can snag from the built-in library. However, not all Smart TVs have access to every app. So you might want to give your smart TV access to the Android TV ecosystem. Alternatively, you might want to use your smart TV as an emulation device to play all those retro console games you can't stop replaying. All you need is a spare single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi and Retro Pie, and you'll be enjoying those classic SNES and Dreamcast games in no time. You can also turn a dumb TV into a smart TV with a Raspberry Pi if you don't currently have access to a smart TV yourself. Smart TVs are versatile pieces of lab equipment While you may not want your Smart TV running on the same network as your home lab for security reasons, that doesn't mean a smart TV or other smart devices can't become versatile pieces of home lab equipment.
