I have a lot of project ideas that I haven’t prioritized enough to spend money on. So, here are some thing I’d like to experiment with:

Computer Hardware⌗

I do love computers! Here are some things I’m particularly interested in!

  • Mikrotik pretty much anything
    • CCR2004 PCIe - trying so hard to find one!
    • CRS500 series to go with the 25G card
    • Any other 10G or 25G cards to go with a high bandwidth Ceph setup
  • Rack-mount small servers (especially 2-post rack style, I like small efficient things)
  • LTO Tape Drive (LTO 5 or newer, SAS) or tape library
  • Asrock Rack PAUL IPMI Card - these are basically impossible to find!
  • Obscure but still usable storage hardware (PCIe?)
  • Mid 90s UNIX workstations

Power⌗

Power is important for a functoinal home lab!

  • Rack mount PDU, trying to find a smart one that I can connect to Home Assistant, preferably with power monitoring so I can do testing of power consumption of my clusters
  • UPS backup, preferably with Ethernet
  • Solar power to save money on running servers

Communications⌗

  • Any somewhat modern fiber communications equipment to play with
  • Software Defined Radio Projects - 4G/5G using srsRAN?
  • WiFi hardware
    • Mikrotik Audience - supports WifiWave2, but seems more useful to me personally than hAP AX2/AX3
    • Some hardware supporting OpenWRT for testing of that maybe?

Home Automation⌗

I’m open to playing with … some things in the HA space. Nothing cloud-based.

  • IP-based thermostat
  • Z-wave dimmer switches (the more the merrier)
  • Energy Monitoring

Camera Gear⌗

I’m hoping to upgrade my camera gear over time, but a few things that would be helpful to me:

  • Teleprompter
  • Very small monitor for better framing
  • A better tripod