From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware

From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware
I have been running Frigate for quite a while now. The Google Coral TPU has long been the "gold standard" for edge processing object detection. It’s efficient, cheap, and handles MobileNet models like a champ. But as my camera count grew and my patience for false positives wore thin, I knew I needed more horsepower. I recently pulled the trigger on the Hailo-8 AI Acceleration Module, and the results have been night and day. The…

Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data

Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data
Earlier this year, I took the time to insulate the walls of the chicken coop and cover the insulation with 1/4" plywood. I had hoped we could go without needing a heater in there in the deep winter, and luckily I was right. With Home Assistant tracking everything to InfluxDB and a Grafana dashboard to keep an eye on it, I can see that when all the doors are closed, it keeps nearly 10 degrees…

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability

Beyond the IP Address: Modernizing Homelab Infrastructure for Security and Scalability
In a growing homelab environment, managing services through raw IP addresses and port numbers quickly becomes a bottleneck for both security and usability, not to mention incredibly annoying unsafe browser warnings. My goal for this project was to move away from fragmented IP service access like 192.168.1.50:8123, and implement an internal routing layer. By deploying Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) in conjunction with Cloudflare, I transitioned my stack to a host-based routing model that provides encrypted,…

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation
When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation" was just a few Philips Hue bulbs and a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant that didn't do much. It was essentially a glorified light switch connected to Alexa. Fast forward to today, and the Raspberry…

Nova’s Fast dev API

Nova’s Fast dev API
Today's been about getting this thing set up properly. I'm not a developer by trade, but I've always been a coder. That being said, I consider myself a prototype developer, so my projects tend to be loosely managed. I wanted to grow this project up a bit, so I took a step back to think about how it's going to work and decided that I wanted to focus on an extensible API first. The Machine…

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time

Nova Assistant: It was only a matter of time
My house is definitely smart to the extreme. I have a lot of automation that runs all aspects of the house, security with AI, and dedicated servers for automation and AI. One example of how I have already wired some of these things together, is a Python service using Ollama & Llava as a false positive checker for Frigate. That being said, all of this private goodness is still connected to Amazon's Alexa ecosystem for…

What years of SBC addiction looks like

What years of SBC addiction looks like
I am a relentless tinkerer. I'm constantly trying to wire something to something else and often single board computers are the glue to some random home automation problem. It's been about 6 years since I started using Raspberry Pi, Arduino and the like regularly. This morning, I wanted to build a little device to monitor a camera feed like a baby monitor and I thought a Raspberry Pi Nano would do perfectly for the job.…

Network & Home Automation Apps

Network & Home Automation Apps
In all, I have quite a few components keeping my home automation system running. Some are apps I use every day, some are for managing different parts of the infrastructure and a few are for entertainment. Nearly everything here runs in docker on my NAS or one of two dedicated docker servers. Home Assistant powers the automations and connectivity between a wide range of smart devices. Security system, locks, lights, HVAC, weather, various sensors and…

A love letter to Docker Compose

A love letter to Docker Compose
Today I moved my Home Assistant setup from the NAS it's been on for 3+ years, to my frigate server. With Frigate processing 15 cameras for objects, both the CPU and GPU rarely rose over 10%. I had noticed some response issues with Home Assistant and had eliminated all of the options except giving it more power. I wanted a clean slate with Home Assistant and planned to import what I needed as I added…

Shop Server Rack – Tower 2

Shop Server Rack – Tower 2
Always trying to improve organization and make things tidy. Moved all of the network and server hardware in my shop to a studio rack I was no longer using. Formally, Tower 2. Top to Bottom AI Docker Server i7-12700KF, 64GB, 5TB SSD, RTX 4070 and RTX 2080TI Ollama - Primarily used by OpenWebUI, but also regularly used as an API via Python. OpenWebUI - UI for Ollama Chat Qdrant - RAG data store for encoding…