This document chronicles my ongoing homelab and home automation journey—it’s perpetually evolving and will never be completely finished or 100% accurate.

My homelab adventure began in 2009 with a simple ReadyNAS, while my home automation obsession started in 2013 with Arduino Nanos. Over the years, I’ve accumulated substantial experience, though I’ll never claim to be an expert—there’s always something new to learn and explore!

Hardware#

3D Printers / CNC Machines#

  • BambuLab H2C with two AMS 2 Pros and an AMS HT
  • Prusa MK4S
  • YoraHome Mandril CNC

Networking#

  • UniFi Cloud Gateway Fiber - Primary site gateway
  • QNAP QSW-M2116P-2T2S - Multi-gig switch with two 10G SFP+/10Gbe ports, remainder are 2.5Gbe
  • UniFi U7 Lite (x2)
  • UniFi 5G Max Outdoor - Cellular fallback when the fiber drops
  • UniFi Dream Router 5G - Gateway and cellular WAN at the second site

Storage#

  • Multiple drive bays for redundant storage
  • Automated backups with Kopia

Server(s)#

Primary/General Hypervisor#

Serves as the backbone, running storage, containers, and a virtual workstation.

  • Intel Core i7-13700 - Built-in iGPU for hardware transcoding
  • AsrockRack W680D4U-2•2T - Server motherboard with built-in 10Gbe connectivity
  • 128GB DDR5 ECC memory - Enterprise-grade reliability
  • Runs IncusOS, with the Docker hosts living in Incus VMs

Second Site#

  • UniFi Dream Router 5G - Gateway, Wi-Fi, and cellular WAN in one box
  • Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) - Runs home assistant, zigbee2mqtt, meshcore remoteterm, birdnet-go

Third Site#

  • Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB) - Runs home assistant, meshcore remoteterm, birdnet-go

Stratum 1 PTP/NTP Server#

Precision timing for the entire network using GPS synchronization.

  • Raspberry Pi CM4 - Compact compute module
  • Waveshare PoE Carrier board - Power over Ethernet
  • UBlox LEA-M8T concurrent GNSS receiver - Sub-microsecond accuracy

Cameras#

Blinds#

Miscellaneous Smart Devices#

Software#

Infrastructure & Orchestration:

  • IncusOS - Immutable host OS underneath the hypervisor
  • Incus - Open-source hypervisor running VMs and LXC containers
  • Docker - Moved away from k3s after an failed ipgrade
  • Arcane - Web UI for managing Docker containers and Compose stacks across hosts
  • OpenTofu - Infrastructure-as-code for repeatable homelab deployments and DNS provider management

Networking & Load Balancing:

  • Traefik - HTTP load balancer with automatic Let’s Encrypt certificate management

Home Automation & IoT:

  • Home Assistant - Central home automation hub
  • Mosquitto - MQTT broker for IoT device communication
  • ZWave2MQTT - Z-Wave network management
  • Zigbee2MQTT - Zigbee network management
  • ESPHome - Custom IoT device firmware for ESP8266/ESP32 controllers (thermostat, garage door, fireplace actuators, etc.)
  • Music Assistant - Ties my music libraries and speakers into Home Assistant

Data & Monitoring:

  • InfluxDB - Time-series database for sensor data storage
  • Grafana - Data visualization creating beautiful charts and dashboards
  • PostgreSQL - Relational database for Miniflux and Home Assistant
  • BirdNET-Go - Identifies birds by song from a backyard mic and logs what shows up
  • changedetection.io - Watches pages that have no RSS feed and tells me when they change

Media & Entertainment:

  • Plex - Media streaming with hardware transcoding
  • Jellyfin - Open-source media streaming (still working to match Plex’s polish; audio passthrough still janky)

Maker:

  • Bambuddy - Self-hosted print archive and monitoring for the Bambu printers, no cloud round trip

Productivity & Utilities:

  • Actual Budget - Replaced YNAB5 in late 2025
  • Miniflux - Minimalist RSS feed reader (successor to Feedly and Google Reader)
  • Vaultwarden - Bitwarden-compatible password server
  • Kopia - Automated backup solution with encryption and deduplication
  • TREK - Trip planner with maps, budgets, and packing lists
  • WelcomeMat - Reservation system for friends and family