I’ve always been a tinkerer. As a kid I took things apart to see how they worked or tried to fix broken or not working things. We had this toy called Creepy Crawlers where you essentially made worms and other various bugs by putting liquid silicone? plastic? rubber? who knows what into metal molds and then baked them in this oven thing so the liquid goo could cure to a firm Jell-O rubber type material. The little oven thing often times didn’t work right and I was able to fix it almost everytime.
In college, I built a fully working arcade out of spare computer and arcade parts. My friends and I played Arcade Ramrod for countless hours and it survived many moves and was even a fixture in the house when I became married. A few years ago a built a Sonos connected, Raspberry Pi, RFID card music player that was controlled with cards. My house is automated with all the things.
But the thing I never really did was have a server that ran all my little projects. That was until this week. Welcome Dilly Server into the world. I picked up a little mini pc and have great plans. Raspberry Pis are great for these kinds of things but the price on those have skyrocketed. What used to be $35 is now almost $100. And most projects need a dedicated device to run properly. When I realized a mini pc could be obtained for under $200 it felt like a no brainer considering I already had the monitor, keyboard, and Mouse setup that I could easily switch devices on the fly.
In the near future I am going to get an ebook server running that allows me to store and download all my ebooks to a reading device. Just need to figure out reverse proxies… Kavita and Calibre Web are the current front runners that I am playing around with.
Home Assistant is also on the short list to implement. With a dozen or more different apps and technologies running all the smart things in the house it will be nice to have everything in the same app or display. Currently you want to see the cameras go to that app, want to change the thermostat go to that find, want to change the lights go to yet another app. This will be a game changer.
I also have a Sonos Spotify RFID project on an old Pi. I wonder if I could run that on the server instead of using the dedicated Pi? I’m sure there are a lot more things I find find that needs to be self hosted and now I am setup to accommodate.