[01]
Production stays stable
Home Assistant OS runs on a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 and handles the live home automations.
A living home infrastructure project
Two sites.
One lab.
A homelab spanning the UK and Spain: home automation, self-hosted services, remote monitoring, and space to experiment.
Built to be useful
Home Assistant handles daily automation, while a Mac mini and a Debian thin client provide room for experiments and self-hosted services. Tailscale connects devices for private remote access.
02locations
03core hosts
01mesh
01 / UKHomeLab Prime
Raspberry Pi 4Home Assistant OS and live home automations
Mac mini M4Development and experiments; moving containers from a Debian VM to macOS
UniFi gateway and switchCloud Gateway Ultra handles routing and DHCP; eero provides Wi-Fi
Tailscaleprivate mesh
02 / SpainRemote node
HP t630Debian 12 and Docker
Independent servicesSelf-hosted services and uptime monitoring
Game hostingValheim server for a small group
A simplified map of roles, not a live status display.
The operating model
Keep the house running. Keep the lab curious.
UK / production
[02]
Experiment separately
The Mac mini is the development machine. The plan is to run containers directly on macOS and keep the Debian VM for testing.
[03]
Watch from elsewhere
The HP t630 runs Debian and Docker, including a Valheim server. Uptime monitoring helps spot service outages.
Separate the critical from the experimental.
New automations can be tested and validated before being moved into production manually. Development should never take control of primary live hardware.
Things in motion
Projects with a purpose.
01
Home automation
Home Assistant brings the Reolink PoE doorbell and Shelly presence and wall controls into the home automation setup.
02
Birdcam
A Greenfeathers camera feeds a self-hosted recording and streaming workflow on the UK compute tier.
03
Valheim
A persistent server on the t630, managed for a small group of players and with backups and private remote access through Tailscale.
04
Documentation
An Obsidian knowledge base for topology, services, ports, runbooks and changes, with a preference for deriving records from live system state.
On the bench
Always evolving.
Next up: replace the eero access points with UniFi, separate devices into VLANs, and continue moving containers to macOS.
UniFi Wi-FiNetwork VLANsmacOS containersService inventories