My Hardware Journey
Around 2019 I moved into a “smart home”. It came fully equipped with switches, locks, lights, plugs, and hubs. It also came with about 7 different apps and a few Echo devices to control everything. On the positive side the place has a fast fiber connection and some enterprise grade networking hardware.
I played around with a Raspberry Pi or HomePi as I affectionately referred to it. It was supposed to be an all-in-one home automation hub, server, and network administration tool. As the project grew, so did the required resources. I could no longer reliably run everything on one little Raspberry Pi. I added a Pi Zero to offload dedicated network tasks like Pi-Hole and WireGaurd VPN.
Eventually noticed the limitations of my networking gear and Raspberry Pis. Once I discovered OPNSense, I built a bare metal system to act as my router. Around the same time I discovered the whole home lab community and started upgrading my hardware.
I’ve broken out the details of my current hardware builds in the following pages: