Rebuilding My Dream Home Lab

I rebuilt my home lab a few months ago and have been trying to optimise it based on my daily usecase. It runs on a Rasberry Pi 4 (8GB) model. The first thing I considered was to run as many services as possible in docker, so that it is scalable and portable, especially if I choose to build a cluster in the future. I began by running a compose to monitor my server load using Grafana, made by Oijkn on GitHub.

Over the next few months, I gathered a list of purposes I wanted my Home Lab to fufuill:

1. Dynamically update my GitHub profile readme.
2. Host an isolated environment to build my webpage.
3. Control IOTs in my smart home and provide visibility over them.
4. Be scalable enough to host future automated scripts and essential docker services.

Eventually, I came out with the following topology:

Tour

Home Assistant

Dashboard on my Home Assistant

I am also running the Local Tuya integration to control my smart lights locally rather communicating with them through the internet. I have also integrated the Daikin aircon controls, and Home Assistant sensors integration on my phone and tablet to see their battery levels and push notifications. I also have statistics displayed for my home lab to have a quick glance on its load performance.

Monitoring with Grafana

Hosted using Oijkn's load monitoring project on GitHub

This Grafana dashboard hosted in Docker allows me to have an in-depth view of the server load of my Home Lab.

Pihole

Dashboard on my Pihole instance

I hardly utilise the dashboard since Pihole is mainly used to handle the DNS requests pointing to services on my home lab.