Homelabing interesting enough to say but why

So far, I tried to not tie myself to big techs for some basic stuff. Like, from starting I switched products for password management, media, IOT management. But stuck with vendor lock and tied to subscriptions and limited control.
Finally, decided to make a home server.
For me, it is not like buying a big rag, Plenty of storage, RAM, and heavy suite like proxmox or other. I started very small from a Raspberry Zero 2W. Why, because money I am a professional developer, I know to build a system that works in limited resources. This is not a bug but a feature. I will try to build tech from scratch that I can run on it. For Media and other IOT stuff.
Also, This is only for my use, I am not building a robust system for millions of users using simultaneously, It is for me only or my family.

This homelabing series is going to be technical and not for production systems. I don't care if I fry my Pi, it is just a learning journey, I might upgrade hardware in the future. We can start with Pi only.

For more context let me tell you what is my ground for now.

1. Raspberry Pi Zero 2W Board (ORIGNAL)
   • 1GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 CPU
   • 512MB SDRAM
   • 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN
   • Bluetooth 4.2, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), onboard antenna
   • Mini HDMI® port and micro USB On-The-Go (OTG) port
   • microSD card slot
   • HAT-compatible 40-pin header footprint (unpopulated)
   • Micro USB power
2. SAMSUNG POWER Prime 256 GB Micro SDXC Class 10 Memory Card
   • capacity: 256 GB
   • Read Speed: 160 MB/s
3. Power Adapter normal 2A for Powering Pi

That's the ground I have installed Ubuntu 64bit lite on memory card and setup Pi with a static IP from home router using it's Mac Address.
So far, nothing is installed, and I can ssh into Pi from my PC that is the bare minimum. Also, One more thing is There are two partitions I have divided unusable ~235GB of storage in ~200GB + rest. So I can deploy stuff on rest part which is ~35GB and can keep the media and all other stuff in that ~200GB part. Safe and simple.
Also, I have installed Samba and did setup so I can mount big 200GB part to my Windows PC and store files. It is easy no big deal.

This is the final ground from where I will be making it The way I want, which includes:

1. Simple IOT controlling Dashboard for remotely switching lights at home and other fun stuff.
2. host simple images and videos downloaded and store, no processing or indexing simple static serving.
3. Simple authentication so, I can restrict certain things and add my family members to access media.
4. Do it in a way so I can add more stuff in future like internal messaging or calling. These are basic enough right, remember we will be doing it under usable 416M ram.

I do have some rules that I will follow. I don't want to mess things by using software that I feel is not giving me control and heavy on the system.

• NO cloud platform for processing or intercepting traffic like Cloudflare tunnel
• No REACT, for building frontend.
• Keep it accessible on remote location, (aka open to use even I am not connected to home network).
• less latency
• Easy to use for non-techy people.
• SECURED!

Sounds crazy, but it is doable.
Let's see how it goes…