I first got the server rack back in 2011. At the time I lived alone in a house; I had a UPS, single server, a few cheap NAS’ and a switch in it. When I met my girlfriend, and we moved together about two years later the rack went into storage. And it stayed in storage until we bought our house late 2014, where we currently live. The rack was put to use in my home office in the basement, but not really utilized much. It’s only lately, and after I found /r/homelab, that the rack was truly put to use in my current homelab.

My mom has a miniature elf house that she takes out every Christmas, and it has become a tradition that all her grandkids partake in the elves moving in. She has tried to mount lights in it before, using a battery powered LED strip, but the lights turned out too bright, and the light was pretty cold. So I ordered some orange flickering candle-like LEDs from eBay and got to work 🙂

I really love the shelf rail system I have on the wall by the electronics lab; it distributes the load evenly over a large surface, and it’s incredibly easy to move things around and try out different solutions. By squeezing some of the existing shelves a bit closer and moving the wire rolls; I was able to fit yet another shelf 🙂

I’ve wanted to use an ESP8266 WiFi module in a project for some time now, and after reading about the WeMos board, I figured this was the easiest way to get started. The WeMos D1 mini is quite small and much easier to interact with and program than the ESP8266 devices. So I built this single relay controller, with internal temperature reporting. I am communicating with it using MQTT, which makes it really easy to implement it into things like Home Assistant.

There are a few things we need to do with the Raspberry Pi single-board computer before using it in IoT projects. Here is a short guide of what I typically do, mostly as a reminder to myself — but it might be of use to others as well 🙂 This article assumes that the Raspberry Pi will be headless, so no GUI.