Hello automation addicted!
Not sure if there is already a simirat thread on the board, anyway let’s try.
I’ve seen many amazing project and state of the art solution concerning devices, sensors, nerdy coding. I’m curious to see what gears give you network and cpu horsepower.
Anything related to networking setup, servers, transmissions, you’re more than welcome to post your pics!
To give the good example I will start first.
Here’s the main connectivity distrubution block:
From the top:
- Digital thermostat with double Noctua fan
- Unifi poe++ 24 port switch
- Unifi dream machine gw
- Raspi 3B with PiHole
- Thinkcentre 730 running Debian, experimental
- Qnap 853 5x12tb + 2tb nvme
- Switch and PDU
- Rack Linktek 12U
Here’s a sweet night view:
Other hardware around the house:
3 Ap Unifi Ui-Ap-Lr
1 Ap Unifi Ui-Nano-Hd
3 Unifi Switch POE 8P
1 Debian fanless box (only for HA)
Zigbee Door/Window switch
2 Aeotec multisensor6
3 Sonoff pow
Homemade sensors:
Main power meter with PZEM
Individual plant watering
2x LCD 4x20 remote display + 2 MAX7299 matrix remote display
Thermostat tasmota infused
Weather station + AQI
A plethora of other sensors, mostly self made with Esp8266/wemos, some of them are here on HAC, check on my profile)
Hope you like it!
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Nice rack and gear!
I’m in the progress of moving my network/server gear to a dedicated rack in the office, so please excuse the mess.
In this picture:
- Intel NUC running HA and other VMs.
- Unifi 8 Port PoE Switch
- USG router
- Pi 3 running Unifi Controller, PiHole and PiVPN
- Crappy router from my ISP, which is not even capable of bridging traffic
Other gear around the apartment used with HA:
- Pi 3 running Deconz and OpenZwave acting as my ZigBee/Z-Wave hub
- Unifi 8 Port Switch
- Unifi AP Pro
- Synology NAS DS 216j with 2 x 6TB
- 6x Pi Zero W running Room Assistant and some other small stuff
- Pi 4 running Kodi
- Android TV box running Kodi
- 13x Philips Hue bulbs
- 15x Xiaomi Door/Window sensors
- Philis Hue motion sensor
- 5x Aeotec Multisensor 6
- 3x Xiaomi Temp/Humidity sensors
- 6x Xiaomi Light sensors
- 6x Hue Dimmer Switches
- Xiaomi Button
- IKEA sound controller remote
- 2x IKEA smart plugs
- Denon AVR
- Yamaha Amplifier
- Roomba Vacuum
And probably some other gear I forgot.
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What is mess for others is your personal vision of order, at least that’s valid for me lol
I’ve quite a lot of sensors, but you can definitely open a shop with the stuff you have 
guess you have a big house.
I also still have a garbage router from my ISP, made me loose sleep for weeks trying to make port forwarding work. I definitelly solved the problem putting the UDM in the DMZ of the crap router, therefore it now act like a transparent modem, and the forwarding is managed by the more stable n secure UDG.
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Old photos when I was running on a pi and had another as a GPIO-MQTT bridge. Now I have a Chinese mini pc and both pi’s are GPIO-MQTT bridges.
More info on the GPIO boards here: Custom Raspi GPIO Interfcae PCB Project
I have a 42RU rack on order and will be moving everything next year. Too hot in the walk-in-closet.
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No, I live in a “large” (132 sqm + 100 sqm garden) rented apartment. A decent house in my area costs between 800k - 1.2m swiss francs with avg salary of around 60k a year (I earn quite a bit more, but I’m only 29 years old.)
That’s exact same thing I did as well 
Does your NAS have multiple network interfaces?
This one comes with 4 gbit ports, there’s an internal virtual switch to assign the single interfaces to specific services or vm, but I added a 10gb interface, so if I transfer large files it won’t eventually slow down any streaming to the tv if someone is watching.
My setup is housed in an 18U half-height cabinet with castors so I can move it around if needed e.g. to get at things in the back. The equipment installed from the top down:
- Fan tray mounted in the top void.
- White box on the left houses a Wemos D1 Mini for temperature/humidity monitoring and my plan is for it to control some internal LED’s in the future.
- Synology DS918+ (2 x 6TB RAID + 2 x 3TB RAID) which runs my HA instance with Aeotech Z-stick in front USB socket (I already had the Synology when I got into Home Assistant and I think this make a great platform, the typical CPU loading of the HA Docker container is 1-2%).
- Synology DS412+ (2 x 3TB) which is my previous NAS and now mainly just used for backups. The black cable from the front USB socket powers a Sonoff RF Bridge.
- TP-Link 24-port managed switch.
- Blanking for a future server if required.
- A slide-out draw for my knick-knacks.
- The white stick to the left of the switch is an Itead CC2531 Zigbee2MQTT stick which is plugged into a USB hub connected to a rear USB socket. Other outlets on the USB hub are used to power the D1 Mini above and provide a comms link to the UPS (see below).
- Rear power strip is mainly used for non-UPS supplies, the white smart plug will turn on the cabinet fans on high temperature (something that has never happened to date).
- A handy shelf with a RPi 3 used for Tuya convert.
- APC UPS mounted in the base which powers the two Synology Diskstations and the switch in case of a power outage (something that occurred a few times until I discovered that the culprit was a faulty iron tripping the RCD on the same circuit).
3 Likes
tom_l Lucky you man having so many entities cabled around the house, I’m stil dealing with access points and repeaters.
The RasPi external GPIO board is such a nice piece of hardware, I’ll dig more into your docs.
@Jonah1970 May I ask why using an external bay if you could fit 4 disk on a single enclosure? How are the two bay connected? it looks a usb3 or Thunderbolt.
I wasn’t thinking that when crawling through the roof and under the floor for weeks on end.
@ombra, both the DS918+ and DS412+ are 4-bay synology NAS’s with 2 ethernet ports at the rear for connectivity with the switch (these work together to provide a theoretical 2gbps connection rather than 1gbps). I got the DS412+ around 6 years ago and installed 4 x 3TB disks as two mirrored volumes. I migrated the disks to the DS918+ a couple of years ago and updated two of the disks from 3TB to 6TB, currently the DS412+ only has 2 installed disks and the remaining slots are spare. The reason for the upgrade was that the DS412+ is not powerful enough to support things like docker, mail server, btrfs for snapshots, transcoding multiple streams on the fly etc. Rather than sell the DS412+ I repurposed it with a minimal installation that I use for backups. Apologies for the lengthy response but I hope that answers your question.
That’s all I can find use for my pi anymore.
@Jonah1970 definitely! Got similar experiences with other NAS, the space is never enough and the disk capacity grows up year after year, plus for many the money factor.
I think for everyone a bit more than a casual user a NAS is a must have at home. Unfortunalely having one of these box means most of the time dealing with continuous swapping/copy in and out/rebuild.
Don’t you have a reduction in signal strenght of your MQTT stick when the metal rack door is closed?
@ombra my experience on disk space was a little different. I originally went for 4 x 3TB disks (2 RAID mirrored arrays giving 6TB total storage) which did me well for 5 years and my main reason for upgrading two of the original disks to 6TB was the worry of disk failure despite the fact that these are mirrored. I am still running two of the original 3TB disks out of curiosity to see how long they last. Ultimately it is a personal thing though and often comes down to how many large files you store like movies, images or multiple backup versions. Interestingly I think the 6TB WD Red disks cost less than the 3TB’s did 5 years ago.
Another thing is that most of the problems regarding array expansion have gone away with the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHT) option, see here https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID_SHR. This states “Unlike Classic RAID, SHR makes the newly upgraded storage readily available for use. If the drives are replaced with larger ones, the upgraded storage can be used as soon as two of the disks are upgraded to form a redundant storage array.”
Regarding your question about the Zwave and Zigbee sticks being inside the cabinet - I have not experienced any problems even though I live in quite a large apartment, this is possibly because the cabinet has a glass front. If it had have been a problem then I would have stuck the USB outside the cabinet at the back or side.
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Here are pics and details of my hardware:
Server Room:
Docker Host & Containers:
Intel Xeon E5560 with 32 GB RAM and 500 GB SSD
Proxmox Host & Virtual Machines:
Dual Intel Xeon E5680 with 76 GB RAM and 8 TB RAID 5 HD
Davis VantagePro2 Weather Station:
My Daily Driver PC:
Dell XPS 15 9560 with 32 GB RAM and 1 TB NVMe SSD
OS: Kubuntu 20.04 LTS
Home Assistant Server:
SuperMicro 113M-6-12C with Intel Xeon [email protected]
48GB RAM and 500GB SSD running Ubuntu LTS 20.04
- Home Assistant on Docker
- Zwave2MQTT on Docker
Synology DS2415+ NAS
32 TB with RAID 5 on each server
Other Hardware not shown:
- NanoPi K2 (RaspberryPi Clone) for PiHole/DNS/DHCP
- NanoPi K2 (RaspberryPi Clone) for Node-Red
- Two Raspberry Pi 3 for Bedroom and Kitchen Kodi Clients
- One Windows PC Intel 6th Gen i5 16 GB RAM for Living Room Kodi
- Two Ubiquiti UAP-AC-PRO-US Access Points
- 45 Homeseer ZWave Plus Wall Dimmers and Switches
- 5 Dragon Tech PD-100 ZWave Plus Plug Dimmers
- 4 Zooz ZSE18 Zwave Plus Motion Sensors
- 2 Fibaro FGMS-001 ZW5 Zwave Plus Motion Sensors
- 1 Zooz ZW15 Zwave Plus Switch for Patio Fountain pump
- 2 FortrezZ MIMOLite ZWave Dry Contact Bridge for Outdoor Gate and Fountain Tank
- 1 Remotec Zwave Dry Contact Fixture Module for Fireplace control
- 2 Aeotec ZWave Plus Range Extender 6
- 5 WiFi Wall Switches with Tasmota
- 15 WiFi Smart Plugs with Tasmota
- Sonoff 4CH Pro with Tasmota to control Garage Opener
- 1 Ecolink ZWave Plus Tilt Sensor for Garage Door Status
- 5 Amazon Echo Dots
- 4 Sonos Play:5 Speakers
- 2 Sonos Play:1 Speakers
- 1 Sonos Boost
- 1 Ring Pro Doorbell
- 6 Hikvision DS-2CD2332 Outdoor Turret Cameras
- 3 Hikvision 2CD2432F-IW Indoor Cameras
- 2 Vivotek FD816B-HT Indoor Dome Cameras
- DSC PC1864NK Power 1864 Alarm System with Envisalink 4 Module
- RFLink 433 MHz Gateway
- RTL-SDR USB Dongle
- Acurite 06002M 433 MHz Indoor Temp & Humidity Sensors
3 Likes
I’ll play. Here’s a recent picture.
In no particular order of equipment:
- Firewalla Purple
- Netgear 16 port PoE unmanaged switch
- TP-Link 24 port unmanaged switch
- 3x Apple AirPort Extreme for network disks (1x Drobo S with 5 disks totaling ~6TB, 1x 2TB WD Elements, 1x repurposed shucked enclosure internals with 500GB drive)
- Apple Airport Express for Airplay and future disk sharing
- Synology DS1515+ (~20TB) with 2 external drives for backups (1x 8TB WD EasyStore, 1x repurposed shucked enclosure internals with 500GB drive)
- backup batteries for network and server
- RPi0W running ZwaveJSui
- Lutron Pro Hub 2
- HDHomeRun Connect Quatro (HDHR5-4US)
- Lorex N843 NVR with 4x E892AB and 2x W461ASC cameras
- 2x Sonos Amp
(not pictured)
- 3x Aruba Instant On AP22
- Sonos Playbar
- 2x Sonos Beam
- 2x Sonos One SL
- 4x RPi 3 running LibreELEC/Kodi
- Aeotec ZStick Gen 5
- Drobo S with 5 disks totaling ~6TB
- 2x WD Elements shucked enclosure repurposed with a 500GB disk for backups
My Synology runs a plethora of docker containers:
- BWALink (talks to serial to WiFi adapter in hot tub for control over MQTT)
- ESPHome
- Grocy (food and inventory tracking)
- HA
- iPerf3 (in server mode to test network conectivity)
- LibreSpeed (alternative speed test app)
- Logitech Media Server (with airplay capability)
- MagicMirror2 (server mode for RPi to connect to in client mode)
- MariaDB (DB for HA recorder and DB for Kodi across all machines)
- MQTT
- Owntone (local control of airplay devices to sync playback of library)
- PHPMyAdmin (manage MariaDB)
- Plex
- Portainer
- Transmission
- TVHeadend (with HDHomeRun Quattro)
future plans:
- more lutron switches and zwave outlets
- more speakers and amps for the house (probably Sonos)
- consolidate backup batteries into a single 2U 1500VA unit
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Interesting way to heat your house 
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@ taylormia
that’s a lot of stuff!
I wonder if you really need all those powerful servers for services that theoretically could run into much smaller machines. I mean, unless you produce your own current that sistem drain way too much power.
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I’d be willing to donate some of the heat to you…if you want 
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Yes, I’m aware. 
Most of it has been collected over many years. Plan on consolidating servers some time in the future…