I really like the idea of an in-wall home control panel - the guy who converted his whole house to illustrations & animations was awesome - but when I try to imagine situations where I’d really use it, I struggle. Definitely not going to get up from the couch and walk over to a control panel when I can just use the phone app, so it’s got to be circumstances where I want to control something, while I’m in a specific place or can’t easily use the phone. Maybe walking out the door, just to see if lights or whatnot are on (if I didn’t have an automation linked to presence). Maybe in the kitchen, to fix music when my hands are too dirty for the phone, but voice control seems like a better solution there.

World is full of gadgets that seem cool, but then you get them home and it’s just easier to do things the old way, and the gadget ends up being a techy Hummel figurine.

I got an N100 motherboard with 4x GB ports and installed ubuntu. Configured 1 port for the ISP, 1 port for a guest network, and bridged the last two with a WIFI PCIe card for the trusted network. hostapd to manage the wifi, and it took a couple tries before I found a card that really handled AP mode well. dhcpd, radvd. bind 9 for DNS, integrated with dhcpd so clients can declare their own hostname. There’s a separate pihole in front of that. Took a while to discover that I had to specifically configure dhclient to the ISP to request IPv6 prefix delegation. The guest network port goes to a ddwrt router.

It also runs a mythtv backend, a couple web sites; immich, jellyfin, and paperless ngx containers. In my head, it’s more of a server with router functions glued on, where […]sense is more of a router with server functions glued on.

I was comfortable with cli administration, and the router side sort of grew organically, with a little victory each time I could unplug another appliance - first a WAP, then a switch. opn/pf-sense is probably an easier way to get into the DIY space, especially if you want to replace your whole infrastructure at one time.

All these people saying 500, 600, 700+ watts - it’s almost hard to believe. My “gaming” computer, with two monitors, peaks around 400W on graphics-heavy games, and the monitors are like 120 of that. I suppose, though, if you’re running a server-class CPU, a half dozen HDDs, and a GPU for continuous transcoding or mining, the it wouldn’t be too hard to get there.

I run a dozen containers on an N100 with a couple of HDDs, VOIP device, router & cable modem on 63W, and I’ve considered that a pretty fair deal for a home lab. Of course, that only serves the household - nothing really offered to the public.

Removed by mod

Same. I love graphs and numbers, and I don’t understand why everyone else seems to prefer cartoons.

Still, if your goal is to get other people to like ha as much as you do, then catering to their aesthetic is key.

I’m happy with 90 day certs for homelab stuff: I’m not worried about anyone MITMing my network. I figure the short lived certs are more important for people who provide services with a significant external user-base, or who process sensitive transactions.

I have my certbot set to check every 12 hours and renew at 60 days. Renewing every 3 days would be 20x more load on Let’s Encrypt systems, and that feels like abuse of a free service for my use case.

Tandoor definitely has a self-hosted path, including SSO integrations. It has a fair API that I’ve used to link it to nutrition data at USDA and my grocery store for prices. I suspect I could use the API to transfer a shopping list to the grocery store’s ordering system, but I don’t like the pickup or delivery systems. I’ve been pretty happy with tandoor’s import-from-web results, although the ingredient amounts often need some editing.

Also love the pi-0-2w, but I’ve started to use ESP32 for those edge sensors. You can get those for like $1-2 each on aliexpress, where real world prices on Pi zero is upwards of $20 now. Truly embedded systems like arduino were always intimidating to me, but esphome reduces ‘programming’ to a YAML for any of the many supported devices. The Pis that are working now aren’t likely to change any time soon, but I bought a handful of ESP32s for $10, and I’ll probably buy another handful before I buy another zero. Maybe convert a zero to ESP32 if I really need a whole OS for something new.

I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.

If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)

Calibre-web and calibre can share a library directory. You can edit the .kobo/kobo/Kobo ereader.conf file to wirelessly sync to calibre-web instead of kobo.com (while still using kobo.com to buy new ebooks)

Just want to be clear that Honeywell UI uses the wifi icon (4 stacked circle sectors) on the z-wave thermo to indicate z-wave connectivity, not 802.11. If it’s got no such icon on the thermostat itself, then I’d guess that something failed during provisioning, so you ended up stuck with just a couple of parameters.

Sounds like you’ve got your hands full, either way. Thank god it’s a fun hobby and not a job :) Good luck.

I have one, and it more or less just showed up. First question: do you have any other zwave devices active & fully functional? There’s a bunch of cheap-ish switches you could get just to validate general network functionality.

It sounds like you might be in reduced power mode. On the thermostat, there should be a wifi icon top-right. If that icon has a little dot at the bottom, it’s in 24VAC mode without 24 VAC power. From the manual:

Thermostat is either included in a Z-Wave network but the Z-Wave signal is lost, or is included but AC power is lost (battery used as backup). In this case, Z-Wave radio is turned off to preserve battery life. AC power must be restored or you have to change the power mode. It can be done via excluding thermostat from Z-Wave network and including again in battery power mode where batteries are used as main power source. You can check the actual power mode in the thermostat MENU/DEVICE INFO.

The 1U system I had, the heatsinks have been fanless and not the extruded aluminum block one usually thinks of, but an assembled stack of much thinner, more rigid fins. It relied on airflow from fans mounted in the middle of the case, between the mobo and disks, shrouded to focus that airflow. I want to say 2x40mm fans per processor.

You should expect a 1U system to run hotter than a desktop, and definitely hotter than cooler advertisers want. CPUs are designed to operate up to 100°C or so, and the constraints that lead people to use 1U form factors generally include replacing those systems regularly, basically because of burnout.

I’ve got no cell reception inside, thanks to aluminum siding, but it’s going to be annoying as fuck if I have to open up my next TV and figure out which circuit board traces are antennae or which chips are wireless.

Not nextcloud, but I have several containers set up to use ‘third party’ database - ie, not running inside the container or compose group, sometimes on a second machine. It definitely complicates the setup. I haven’t noticed any performance issues, but my services are low load.

I would think that the db running on the Pi with storage on the Pi could be faster than the db running on the laptop with storage on the Pi. The Pi db would presumably have higher bandwidth to the Pi storage and only have to transfer the selected data over network, where the laptop db has to do all the db sorting, filter, and processing over the network, although I suppose the db would try to keep all the data in RAM. I know there’s limitations to Pi’s internal bus bandwidth, Maybe you can compare the hdparm performance of the NAS RAID vs the NFS mount.

My homelab has been running for 20 years, during which I’ve gone through something like a dozen desktop and laptop PCs. Copying a terabyte of media to each of those computers seems like a terrible waste. My TVs, either through Raspberry Pi or their own software, can also play all of that media.

The homelab also runs a few 24/7 services that do stuff overnight (most notably sensor data logging), pihole, routing, media management. It’s lower power than the desktop/gaminng computer, and it’s not practical to have those 24/7 services on a laptop that leaves the house periodically.

So, homelab to minimize the amount of storage replication, minimize power consumption, and provide always-on processing.

Of course, having that platform, it’s also an opportunity to play. Implement services that totally wouldn’t be practical in and of themselves, but setup makes a fun diversion for an afternoon or a weekend. Remote access for the rare occasion when I’m traveling. Monitoring the otherwise invisible, headless computers. (like NUT to keep track of 3 different UPSes)

All the thermostats I’ve looked at - definitely all the “smart” ones, accommodate all manner of existing wiring. If you just have a ‘normal’ HVAC with a single aircon, single furnace, and fan, or one with heat pump, backup furnace & fan, then any thermostat out there will work. If it has internal logic, it’s going to have a place for batteries, but it will also (probably) have the capability to run off furnace power, if you have the right wires. Smart thermostats will report their battery state to homeassistant, or you can just change the battery when you switch it over to heating for winter.

Swapping a thermostat is pretty easy - it’s literally ‘connect red wire to terminal labeled red.’ It’s complicated if you care what the red, yellow, blue &c wires actually do, but the install itself is just color matching.

If you have an extremely high efficiency HVAC, or one with multiple heat sources & multiple compressors, then there may be more than the usual 6-ish wires, but even there, it will be an exercise of taking wire from its current, clearly labeled terminal and plugging it into the same labeled terminal on the new thermostat.

If you can stick with the same vendor for a thermostat upgrade, it may make the job very easy. I replaced a Honeywell programmable thermostat with one of their smart thermostats, and I didn’t even have to change wires. Both thermostats plugged into the same backing/terminal block. I literally pulled the old one off and pushed the new one on in 10 seconds. No tools.

I believe it’s that older HVAC controls don’t have a true ground/neutral, so they can’t actually consume power. Thermostat is (used to be) basically just a remote switch, just connecting the signal wire to its various functions, so there’s no need for it to have any kind of power. More recent systems have a ground (C wire), so you can draw power between the 24V R wire and the C common/ground. Some systems even put mains voltage on R.

Interestingly, the specific article cited is more making the case that all passenger cars are bad, and we’d be better off with e-bikes, transit, and walkable cities. i.e.: I don’t think hes saying 'EVs are worse than ICE," which is where the ‘lifetime emissions’ line usually goes. He’s saying “fuck cars, EVs not excepted.”

Just what I was looking for. Recently got a kobo for experimenting, and just starting to figure out how to integrate it.

I’d still rather physical books, but sometimes there’s just too much premium for too shitty of POD trash.