Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time
I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my stuff. So I built one. It's called Nova, it lives on my LAN, and nothing it hears has to leave the property. The interesting part of this project wasn't the tool itself. It was making…

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.…

Cisco Network Upgrade Complete

Cisco Network Upgrade Complete
I've been using a variety of different brand switches in a patchwork to get all of the network and camera devices I am using connected. The network mess was causing performance issues so it was time to take a more serious approach to the network. I need to connect two buildings, and power many PoE devices. The backbone of the network is two Cisco CBS350-24P-4X managed switches connected via 10Gbps SFP+ over copper. The old…