I tried using agents on a small Orange Pi and other small machines, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, unfortunately, it’s not feasible to do this in a practical way.
Of course, I started writing an agent that could run in such an environment (long timeouts, retries, etc.), but it’s a real pain.
For this to make sense, you need much more powerful hardware (a 5-year-old Mac mini is fine); the other issue is power consumption. Unfortunately, until you can run Mavericks 2 on your own hardware, it’s pretty expensive.
I like computers that can run for several days or weeks on a single charge. Today, better processors and better screens could make this possible. Add solar panels and we would have weak computers that work like calculators. No power from the wall!