I’ve thought about doing this too. You would have the button trigger some identifier like a phone notification, screen, or even a light and then reset itself after so many hours or at scheduled times to know if they’ve been fed.

We have to give our cat a pill in the morning and evening so it would help us know if the other (or someone else like a relative babysitting) had already given it to him in addition to the feeding schedule.

I’d definitely skip this in favor of something consumer-grade. You can find used Dell Optiplexes all over the place cheap and stick a large drive inside/outside of it and use it for a couple of years.

A big old server is just going to drain your wallet on both power and parts with equal or worse performance and a lot more complexity for what 99% of home users will use it for.

It sounds like your main goal is probably a media server and an Optiplex will give you an i5 or i7 with QuickSync which works excellent for processing video. RAID isnt really necessary here because you can just download more Linux ISOs if these one are lost, though it can be great later if you buy a bunch more drives and expand into other areas where data is less replaceable.

Can’t say on access behind CG-NAT, as I haven’t ever dealt with it, but Tailscale might work as a free third-party option though that’s just a guess.

I have both but just basic options. Like with WLED lights (if you’re familiar), I’ll have buttons for turning them on and off and controlling the brightness, and ignore everything else light presets, color, patterns, segments, night light, etc because there isnt a great way to list them all in a compact space especially when you have 10 separate WLED devices. Typically I’ll just use the WLED app if I want to do anything outside of basic functionality.

Though, reading some of the other comments here, it sounds like voice control is nowhere near as far along as I imagined it was so maybe my laziness will prevail and I’ll attempt setting it up at some indeterminate time in the future.

Okay now answer: What gets wetter as it dries?

I think itd be a great way to control everything rather than spending hours and hours making dashboards while trying to include the 20 different entities each device comes with without it looking like a jumbled, convoluted mess. “Computer turn off the TV” “Computer turn on the kitchen lights” “Computer open the blinds” “Computer set the thermostat to 73.” I dont really use voice commands anywhere else but this sounds like it could be really useful. I gotta start looking at how to enable all this.

I did this with ESPHome on an ESP8266 connected to an IR led for some rope lights that had IR control. The hard part is finding the codes for each control, but there’s a surprising amount of info out there.

You can connect an SSD to these boards and boot from that instead of an SD card. Definitely the way to go especially considering SSDs dont really cost more than SD cards.

I have no familiarity with Yunohost but this is just a matter of separating your services. Have one container with the *arrs, qbit, glutun, and VPN and a separate container with Immich and Nextcloud. I personally use Proxmox with Portainer to run tne containers, but you may be able to just run Portainer on your OS to accomplish the same thing.

You’ll only connect to people who do have port forwarding setup, but nobody else.

There’s also the possibility they’re referring to the current draw through the mobo connector itself frying things. A couple of HDDs at 12V, 10W will be pulling almost 2A which can be a lot for some circuit board traces, but there’s no great way know what the board can handle without documentation from the manufacturer or someone with relevantt engineering experience well above what a typical computer repair shop would have.

If I were OP I would just roll the dice and try it out. Its not as if old Dell office PCs are high dollar items.

Those are the molex to sata power adapters that are a fire hazard. I haven’t ever heard of this type causing issues and have been using them for years and years without issue.

Do you guys even think twice about the things you like getting angry about??

I guarantee if they went the other way and only offered a stripped down dashboard with little configurability people would also be complaining that they can’t customize things to best suit their needs.

On a new install specifically when you select the option to auto-generate a dashboard during setup.

To hide sidebar items in a browser you can click on the top left “Home Assistant” button or click on your username at the bottom left and select “Change the order and hide items from the sidebar” in User Settings.

This is what i have. Amcrest cameras tied to an Amcrest NVR which offers remote viewing, recording, and playback and then also tied into Frigate and Home Assistant also for remote viewing, event notifications, etc. I could ditch the NVR but I’d need to get a POE switch and I like having it as a backup.

I followed this dude’s tutorial to get everything setup in Proxmox: https://youtu.be/qmSizZUbCOA

Just as a backup you might consider putting some atandalone zigbee/z wave temp sensor in the garage just as a double check that the heater is operating as it should

Today I have a huge bottleneck in unpacking and moving. I’ve got 1gb fiber and can saturate it, getting a complete iso in just a few minutes, but then it’s another 30min plus waiting for that to actually be usable.

Are you doing this all manually or using the *arr suite? For me, this process takes a minute or two depending on the size of the files with Proxmox and ZFS but even previously on Windows 10 with SnapRAID it was quick.

Its honestly pretty small for what you can pack inside but they do have smaller options like the Node series. The 304 is around 8"x10"x14" with room for 6 drives.

The third alternative (and best IMO) is to buy a PC case with lots of drive slots and transfer everything into it. With a NAS you’re going to pay a ton of money for the NAS itself which is just laptop-equivalent hardware and a fixed number of drive bays meaning you can’t expand it when it fills up without buying more expensive hardware, and you’ll also be forced into buying matched drives. With an HDD enclosure, you’re spending less money but again fixed on the number of drives while also being somewhat unreliable due to the USB connection.

I use a Fractal Design Define 6 midtower case which can hold around 12 HDDs. For hardware I bought a mobo with the most SATA ports I could get and began slowly buying drives as my storage pool filled up, eventually needing an LSI HBA card to expand the number of SATA connections. This is the best value IMO as the cost is comparable to buying a NAS, you can add drives as you go with a much higher drive capacity, the connection is rock solid, and you can run real PC hardware.

It was definitely not fun stringing Cat6 through the attic, but knowing myself, I probably wouldn’t have stayed on top of battery changes and I also wanted 24/7 recording since a battery powered camera can miss movement and start recording late or not at all. I also need a doorbell camera still but I’ve had trouble finding one that checks all the boxes.