My lab equipment and why

This is another filler blog to hit a quota. There's nothing of distinctive interest in here, but keep reading if you want to know how I set up my home lab, and some recommendations on setting up yours.

Importantly, for the majority of my network, I have quite a few gigabit switches scattered throughout my house.  It works, and keeps me from having to spend a small fortune on putting in tons of CAT5 jacks in the wall behind my entertainment center and in my office. The physical architecture of my environment has dictated my network.  I have 4x SD2008 from Linksys as extensions from a Verizon FiOS Router.  For Wi-Fi I have the Linksys Velop system.  Not to sound like an idiot, but I missed the memo about Belkin buying Linksys from Cisco.  I would have gone with the Ubiquiti system that apparently everyone in the know is talking about.  As far as gigabit hubs, I have no regrets.

Aggregate 1:

What I should have bought

For my main server, the workhorse of my household, I have a FreeNAS system running on a C2750 board with 32Gb of RAM.  Nothing fancy or special, like a re-commed PowerEdge or some other dual Xeon that sounds like a helicopter in my house.  I have been using Bhyve to virtualize some Photon instances on, and run my Plex server as a jail.  It also houses my NFS and media shares. I highly recommend putting in a FreeNAS system for a home lab.  QNAP is a nice alternative but I really love ZFS in a way that had coworkers making fun of me, so I needed a system that gave me the full system access that FreeNAS does without the headache of building out some Linux system that didn't have the plugins. This system was an upgrade from another server about 5 years ago, which was an upgrade from PMS running on a linux box installed about 10 years ago.

Aggregate 2:

Do yourself a favor

I have plenty of media endpoints throughout my house.  I've tried out the Fire Stick, Roku, MythTV (yeah, I went there), Playstation 3, Xbox 1, Xbox 360, and Chromecast. Roku wins.  It does everything I want.  I will gladly recommend spending the money on the best Roku device you can get.  I may have a bias towards Amazon, but not in the home entertainment ecosystem.

Aggregate 3:

Get a few

My home lighting is a big deal.  It started when I was younger, and is kind of funny.  When my mother would wake up and check on my brother and I, she would turn on every light between where she was and we were.  My father spent a good amount of his life turning off every light in the house.  I have groups set up to turn on and off lights, using 90% GE Z-Wave light switches.  I have a Couple Zooz, and a few Ecobee Switch+ units as well.  My problem with Zooz is that they ruin consistency.  If my smart switches are smart, I want them to be consistent.  Zooz is great for people who want to save money on smart lighting and don't care about consistency.  You do not need to buy add-on switches with Zooz, it replaces the powered switch only.  The Ecobee lacks a major feature and is fairly pricey, but worth the money.  What I mean with lacking a major feature is that it cannot be used in two-way switches.  But it has motion detection and Alexa built in.  If you have a mesh network and don't need the two way switching, Ecobee is where it's at.

Aggregate 4:

These are good

Aggregate 5:

These are really good

I also use smart light bulbs.  I have only tried Hue, so I won't get into this one.  I like hue, except for when the power goes out and a few rooms in my house light up when the power comes back on.  It does not remember last known state the way that many smart home devices do, but, it shouldn't because you may need light immediately after an emergency.

For whole home voice, I use Alexa, because I have built smart home devices in the Amazon ecosystem.  It is considerably more difficult to build a smart home device for private use in the Google ecosystem.  Check my other blog entries for more information on this.  

As anyone who reads my blog knows, I built my own smart cameras, so I will post the obligatory raspberry pi link.

Aggregate 6:

Get more than one

My last notable device is my desktop.  I went on Ebay and got some gamers old computer.  It's a 4 core AM2 processor in a decent motherboard with 4GB of RAM.  I Verified the RAM recently.  I was amazed at what I could do with 4GB of RAM.  I have an M.2 drive for storage only, because the system cannot boot from the PCI slots.  I have a 128GB SSD and an ancient graphics card.  It is in desperate need of replacement.  Yet, I have done more with this old box than most of the developers I know do with their I7 systems.  So, maybe a Chromebook flashed with Ubuntu is all you need for management?

For experimentation I have quite a few bits and pieces laying around.  I have learned the hard way that buying a bunch of sensors individually or all as a single unit may not be the ideal method of experimentation.  Spending 500$ on pi hats that each do one thing is ridiculous.  I do have a Matrix Creator, and it has helped me understand integration of sensors and the pi, but it is a little wonky in regards to pure setup of sensors and a pi.  If I were to try to learn about sensors again with my current knowledge, I would probably go with a 6 in one z-wave+ multi-sensor with a z-wave dongle.  Probably using the MQTT broker. 

Aggregate 7:
Matrix sensor hat, it has everything

Aggregate 8:
6 in 1 z-wave multi-sensor

Aggregate 9:
Z-wave dongle expensive edition