Hobby

Arduino & Microcontrollers

Family era, including small services on Raspberry Pi

Part of the family-era hobby expansion, and it overlaps constantly with electronics, 3D printing, and the LED/WLED side of things - an Arduino Nano, sensors, and a breadboard are usually involved whenever a project needs to sense or control something. Here's a typical kit laid out before a build: an Arduino Nano, a DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor, a cooling fan, a USB power module, a handful of transistors, and a perfboard to make it permanent.

It also covers the Raspberry Pi side of the homelab - a small cluster running services like piVPN, Asterisk, and Home Assistant, monitored here on a wall-mounted tablet dashboard.

It goes back to the basics too - a breadboard LED-and-pushbutton circuit, the kind of first project everyone starts with - and up to custom boards like an ESP32 dev module mounted on its own proto shield with screw terminals for a permanent build.

A breadboard circuit with an LED lit up red, a pushbutton, and a microcontroller board

A basic breadboard LED-and-pushbutton circuit.

Arduino project components laid out on a cutting mat: a breadboard, Arduino Nano, DHT22 sensor, cooling fan, USB power module, transistors, and a perfboard

A typical kit before a build - Arduino Nano, DHT22 sensor, fan, and perfboard.

An ESP32 development board mounted on a custom proto shield with screw terminal blocks

An ESP32 dev board on a custom proto shield with screw terminals.

A stack of four Raspberry Pi boards with red status LEDs lit, next to a wall-mounted tablet showing a Home Assistant dashboard with CPU, memory, and temperature stats for piVPN, Asterisk, and Home Assistant

A small Raspberry Pi cluster running piVPN, Asterisk, and Home Assistant, monitored on a wall-mounted dashboard.