I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
Hi Average Joe 👋 just start with a simple PiHole installation. From here on, the options are endless
If you spend some time learning how docker/podman works you’ll be able to host practically anything!
Is very nice as a personal messenger (WhatsApp replacement) for friends and family. It uses XMPP.
Joplin.
You don’t strictly have to self host it but it’s gotten pretty good with a WYSIWYG editor now and everything.
I have a PiHole, my own EdgeRouter that is behind the Verizon router, a UPS, a wired switch, a SiliconDust HD HomeRun to convert my cable to a stream, my Hue controller, my Camera DVR, and a Pi4 hosting network storage.
It all fits neatly in a 6U closet rack. I use the EdgeRouter to host a VPN I can connect into to manage things for the house, and also use it to dial out to a VPN, so I can connect the TVs in the house to a VPN abroad.
I also have a Smart Garden powered by a raspberry pi, connected to a rain barrel, a water pump, some solenoids, and some moisture sensors.
Smart garden sounds amazing! My girlfriend would love that… Maybe I’ll set that up with her!
Yes I actually have two of them. My backyard has three outdoor moisture sensors, so it can know if it’s moist enough. It has a drop irrigation system connected to regular plastic pressure for tubing. It has two zones that can be controlled with two solenoids. It also has a 12V pump. All of that is powered by a 12V power supply and controlled by a four zone relay board. Remember to turn the power off to your outdoor sensors so that they don’t destroy themselves when you’re not sensing. You can also add a flow sensor to measure your water consumption.
I was considering a smart garden setup as well. I ended up going with a dumb version that has no dependency on any electrical power: Blumat. They’re from Austria, if i recall correctly. They feed water as the plants consume it.
The Blumat “carrots” are porous and as the soil dries, pressure becomes negative and opens up the switch that controls the feed water line, which then drips water onto the soil until its reached the calibrated moisture level which closes the switch.
Not “self-hosted” in the traditional sense but definitely hosted in the primitive sense.
My larger system is entirely 12V power and is connected directly into a 2-panel 24V solar system with battery.
But entirely mechanical without external input like power is a really good idea.
Those sound really useful. I like the no power aspect that just works.
As someone who has no idea how to do any of this, I think I might need to learn…
If you can do python and you can wire one part to one part, one part at a time, it’s not hard, at least to me. Get the analog sensor, connect it to the analog to digital converter, connect all of their power to a relay, connect the relay and the converter to the pi, connect that to power. Then use Python to check the value in a loop, forever.
Hey that sounds amazing, may I ask what moisture sensors you are using?
Edit: also automating sensor power draw sounds like something fun to work on. I’d love to test if having them power on just before or shortly before taking a reading and power off is feasible. Or if they need more time to get an accurate reading, finding the most optimal power cycle schedule to prolong sensor life while being able to take measurements at sensible times.
ACEIRMC 2set Soil Moisture… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JSND12L?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
They’re just resistive electrodes with an analog sense of the conductivity of the soil, which is linearly correlated with moisture. It does this by applying a voltage to one side and sensing the current load to the other probe. This is exactly the same as electroplating, so if you keep them on 100% of the time, one will essentially dissolve in the dirt.
Instead, I run their power through a relay. I turn one relay on, it turns on all three of my sensors, I wait a few seconds, take three reads off each, one second apart, take the avg of each sensor, and record that. You can the save that to a timeseries database and host that locally too. Then plot that with Graphana.
To read the analog values, I use this: HiLetgo 3pcs ADS1115 16 Bit 16… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPFLSMX?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Now that you have logs, you can check moisture levels before activating your irrigation.
The next step is I have a set of float sensors in the rain barrel, towards the bottom. If the bottom one indicates empty it activates a solenoid to refill from the tap until the top one indicates full. They’re about two inches apart.
For me nextcloud was the biggest gamechanger. A raspberry pi and a SSD and suddenly I didn’t have to store anything at Google drive anymore. And it’s really beginner friendly, especially when using NextcloudPi
- Pi hole
- Syncthing(was able to replace Dropbox for my keepass database when they decide to limit number of devices for free tier) - perfect for regularly updated files and backups for photos, etc.
- Audiobookshelf - great way to manage audiobooks, also has a nice android app plus can turn each audiobook/series/collection of books into RSS and put in your favorite podcast app
- Plex/Jellyfin for media collections
FreshRSS, news and websites fetched your way. You can even create feeds for websites that don’t provide one
i use miniflux, anyone have used both and can tell me if I’m missing out on smth :)
Quick question, don’t want to highjack the thread. This looks interesting, but I don’t understand why I couldn’t just install it on my regular laptop running fedora. Why does it need it’s own server?
Well you can install it locally and get the web interface via localhost, but if it’s a proper server you can access the news from your sources from anywhere and you can also use 3rd party apps in your phone to get a different interface via the API
FreshRSS is just a PHP app so you don’t even need a VPS - you could even install it in a regular shared hosting account.
Do you have any recommendations for 3rd party apps? I did a quick search but couldn’t find any apps built for FreshRSS
On Android, the main apps are Readrops and FeedMe
Brilliant. Thanks!
Reeder for iOS/macOS can’t be beat!
On their GitHub page it has a list mobile / native apps that can access FreshRSS.
Oh ok thanks. I do like the idea of access from anywhere… I’m guessing a VPN would be needed on the server and phone? Or is this a whole big thing?
Check out tailscale, the best tool ever to access a server without opening ports or doing hard stuff
Or Cloudflare tunnels
yeah but I kinda dislike cloudflare. Tailscale is based on wireguard which is cool
Cool, I’ve heard of it but never really looked into it. I’ll give it a try.
Any mobile app you use it with?
On iOS, I’ve had good experience with NetNewsWire and Reeder
This is exactly what I need. Let me do some research on this.
Hey I got FreshRSS self hosted and everything is up and running smooth. Only thing is, for the websites without RSS… how did you get the RSS for those?
I made a blog about this. Make sure to follow it via RSS too ;)
https://joelchrono12.xyz/blog/newsboat-queries-and-freshrss-scraping/
Thanks bro
n8n changed my life but job specific
What about hosting a web server, would it not be quite a change too?
syncthing works on every device and substitutes for cloud storage services. pictures taken with a phone end up quickly in the shared folder on my desktop. etc.
Swinger parties?
I can also use a public server. What is the massive live changing gain by hosting an ow Matrix server?
Trillium notes and Bitwarden.
The note is packed with features and it can build maps from your tags aromatically. It helped me easily recall things
Bitwarden, because password need to be secured.
Portainer - For docker containers.
AdGuard Home on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Pico W.
HomeAssistant on its own hardware. Home automation
SearXNG - private search.
Whoogle - private search.
Shaarli - Bookmarks.
youtube-dl - downloading videos.
PaperlessNGX - document storage.
Trilium Notes - notes app
These are the ones I can’t live without. All docker containers running on a NAS.
