I’ve been working up to a better virtualization and storage setup for my homelab for awhile now. One part of this is cataloguing my media and expanding the virtual side of the media library. I have a legacy collection of DVDs and BDs which I’d like to import, and that means I need to rip them from disk. The decryption and transcoding process requires a decent CPU. The demand for high performance leads me to want to run this in a virtual machine (where it can get low priority access to a wealth of compute resources), but the need for a physical disk drive also makes me not want to walk down to the basement every time a disk is done to change disks.

I’ve been working on a new OctoPrint system for my 3D printer, and as part of this project I made some nice flashy individually addressable LEDs for the sides of the enclosure to show the print status. The full project page is coming soon, but I just had to give you guys a sneak peek at the LEDs. These are WS2812 style individually addressible LEDs, controlled by an OctoPrint plugin on the Raspberry Pi, along with a perf board PCB I soldered to power and level-shift them.

I bought a ton of new Z-wave switches and dimmers, and I’m still trying to find the best user interface for automated lighting given the equipment I have, as well as what would be ideal in a new built house. Today, I tried a few automations for my kitchen lighting, which being the center of activity in the house, are the most noticed by everyone, and must work properly at all times.

As I expand the reach of Home Assistant, I continuously try to build automations that make life generally easier for the users of the home. To me, automation isn’t about being able to control anything from my phone - in fact, the less I have to get my phone out, the better. I will still enjoy tracking history entries and status of nodes with both the web UI and app, but I shouldn’t have to, the house should just work.

When I started my bathroom automation journey, I used the Inovelli 4-in-1 Motion Sensor (LZW60) which had sensors for motion, temperature, humidity, and ambient light level in my Smart Bathroom Project. I was happy with the automation, but wanted to try out some cheaper sensors to see if they were adequate for the other bathrooms in my house. I decided to try the Aqara (Xiaomi) Temperature and Humidity Sensor and the Sonoff SNZB-02 Temperature and Humidity Sensor as cheap alternatives for temperature and humidity.

I finished the box! At least I finished it enough to start using it. It still needs OctoPrint, lighting, and some RGB LEDs (doesn’t everything these days?). But, it’s usable now. Check out the Project Page for the full story. The New Box In addition, I’ve started designing a Raspberry Pi case for my OctoPrint Pi. First revisions are shown below. I thought I’d start with this case and re-print it as I add things to the enclosure, but I think I’m going to go caseless for now and work up to what I want the final design to be.

Inspired by recent a recent video on the basics of PXE booting by ‘Tall Paul Tech’ (formerly known as CWNE88), as well as a comment by Linus of Linus Tech Tips that his new home server could ’network boot everything in his house’, I wondered how easy it would be to network boot everything in my house. In an ideal world, this would solve a lot of problems regarding managing backups of the drives - by simply not having drives at any client, they can all be managed and backed up centrally by the server.

It’s always a good day to receive new hardware, and today is no different. Over the past few days, I’ve received a bunch of hardware in the mail and I’d like to share my plans with you. Ever since I setup my first automations with my blinds and started automating my lighting and bathroom, I’ve been addicted to automating more and more of the house. So, after spending a lot of money on high end Z-wave motion sensors, dimmers, and switches, I went searching for some more cost-effective products to try out.

After my scare with the Z-wave controller dying due to SD card failure (See the blog post), I decided that my Zigbee network is important enough to back up, especially because a whole lot more important data is stored on disk rather than in the dongle as with Z-wave. I’m going to follow the same path I took in the Z-wave blog, but for Zigbee2MQTT. Since it’s running ‘bare’ on a raspberry pi, I can’t just backup the whole virtual machine.

In my previous tests using Software Defined Radio (SDR), I used rtl_433 to successfully receive data from an outdoor weather station sensor. Always seeking more data, I found rtlamr - a tool which decodes smart meter data. I don’t really need to read smart meter data since the only smart meter I have is my power meter and I already have my own meter for that, but I still was excited to give it a try and see what I could find!