This is a shortlist of some essential hardware for any home lab:

  • Single Board Computers
    • Raspberry Pi 4 [Link]
      • Full-featured computer with 4 or 8 GB of RAM options.
    • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 Wireless [Link]
      • With dual-band wifi and a quad-core CPU but only limited to 512 MB of RAM.
  • Routers
    • GL-iNet GL-AR750S-Ext [Link]
      • An excellent travel router with 3 Gbps ports, independent dual-band access point, MicroSD reader, USB port, native OpenVPN, programmable physical buttons, and more.
    • Netgate SG-1100 [Link]
      • Professional 3 Gbps port router loaded with PfSense (they are the official developers by the way) plus USB3, USB2, and mini PCIe.
    • Protectli Vault [Link]
      • Fanless, x64 CPU, from 2 to 6 Gbps ports, capable of running hypervisors (such as XCP-ng and Proxmox), bare-metal Operating Systems (Windows and Linux), and others.
  • Gadgets
    • Raspberry Pi Pico [Link]
      • $5 microcontroller for all automation projects.
    • Digispark ATTINY85 [Link]
      • $8 Arduino compatible USB development board.
    • Hak5 Lan Turtle [Link]
      • It runs OpenWRT and can be used as a swiss knife tool (with an internal MicroSD card reader) or as a permanent physical implant for a stable reverse shell, Man-In-The-Middle attack, etc.