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.

In this project, I setup a proper OctoPrint server for my 3D printer, and integrate it into the enclosure I already built. I also add some RGB flair to make it look nice, and set it up to integrate with Home Assistant. I’m very pleased with the results, so follow along for how I set it up. Building the Circuit Since I want to use WS2812 LED strips to show the printing status, I need a small circuit.

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.

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.

I’m fairly protocol agnostic in my home automation system, and that’s one of the benefits of building something with open source software like Home Assistant - there’s no vendor lock in and you can pretty much connect anything you can pull data from into it. While I’ve set up a Zigbee network for my blinds and ordered a ton of cheap sensors from Aliexpress to test, and set up a reliable Z-Wave network with more expensive sensors and lighting dimmers, I’m always looking to expand the wealth of data I can capture.

As mentioned in my last blog post, I setup an autofs share to mount my NAS for backups. Since I’ve always used fstab in the past to mount this, and it’s quite unreliable for cifs shares, and some internet articles go into way more detail than necessary on setting up autofs, here’s a very quick overview on setting up samba / CIFS shares with autofs on Raspberry Pi OS (or any other Debian / Ubuntu based system).

I got my Z-Wave Raspberry Pi setup a few weeks ago, and then spent a ton of time setting up my Bedroom Lights, Bathroom Fan+Light, and ordered even more Z-wave hardware. I also started up an RTL-433 server for a yet unfinished project, and about a week later, Home Assistant suddenly reported all of my Z-wave devices offline. Home Assistant was unable to connect to the WebSocket of ZWaveJS. The Pi was acting really weird.

After playing with my Zigbee-controlled IKEA FYRTUR Blinds, I wanted to experiemnt with automated lighting. Despite already having a functional Zigbee network, I wanted to choose high quality, reliable lighting components. After spending a ton of time researching on the internet, I decided to start a new Z-Wave network, using Inovelli dimmer switches. This project is my first attempt to get the network functioning. The Choice of a Network After my (somewhat poor) experience with Zigbee, I wasn’t eager to use Zigbee hardware again for something critical like lighting.