Hardware

A couple of years ago, I bought a Raspberry Pi. I was mostly interested to see how easy it would be to use the device and to brush up on my Linux hands-on experience.

Quickly a couple of services where running on the device. Things like PiHole, a webserver with PHP and the Unifi Network controller. This inevitably led to the Pi being overworked and needing a restart more than once per week. Not the best experience to have, though no really critical systems where running on it.

When visiting a friend I learned about Home Assistent and node-red. These looked like really fun systems to play around. My friend has a lot of lights in his house controlled by Home Assistent – but that was (and still) is not very appealing to me. I’m not ready to investment in the infrastructure, lightbulbs and switches just yet. I was intrigued by controlling the sunscreen via the system, with the use of a small board with an antenna, that could be attached to the Pi I already had.

When we were living in our previous house, we had an attic that was spacey enough to have a permanent place for my turn tables and a dedicated music computer. I’d bought a cheap AMD based computer which has a videocard embedded on the CPU. In our current house we have a dedicated office room, but not much space for a separate music room. The music PC was just collecting dust for some time already.

I just found a new purpose for that machine!

• Computer – AMD – Linux (server 1)
  • 16GB memory
  • 4 threads CPU
  • 2.7TB disk space
• Computer – Intel – Linux (server 2)
  • 16GB memory
  • 4 threads CPU
  • 100GB disk space
• Sunscreen controller – Pi
• Heating system