Where it all began

My love affair with with Single Board Computers (SBCs) started with my undergraduate thesis. The task was to create a 3D scanner using low cost components (3D printers were just hitting the mainstream) and I was given a BeagleBone Black with which to do the processing. I was amazed at the size - an entire computer that fit on my palm.

I wired it up to a stepper motor that drove a rotating platform, a line laser and a webcam. Throw in some hand soldered drive electronics and a little bit of C and I was spitting out point clouds in no time.

My next foray into SBCs came a year later when some university friends asked for help with a startup they were launching called PulseCheck. They were making IoT cameras for restaurants and bars and had built a platform for embedding the feed on to the venue's website. My role was manufacture - taking dummy camera shells from China and stuffing a Raspberry Pi, camera module, USB hub and broken open 5V power supply in the tiny space. I didn't touch the code, I remember seeing my friends wrestling with SSL certificates (before LetsEncrypt freed the world) and being glad that wasn't my job.

But soon it would be, when later that year someone finally paid me to play with a Raspberry Pi. The company I worked for had a maintenance contract with a supplier to the Mercedes Benz factory in South Africa. They were looking for a way to stop the wrong rivets from being put into the wrong hopper. We came up with a solution that involved a barcode scanner, a magnetic lock and a Raspberry Pi. To program the barcodes we needed an admin interface. My first introduction into web development - hand coded HTML with inline JS and the ugliest interface you have ever seen. But in many ways, it was the beginning of the rest of my life.

Since then I have used Raspberry Pis constantly, both personally and professionally. A brief list:

• XBMC (now Kodi) to watch my linux ISO collection on my TV
  • Controlled using my TV remote with a DIY IR receiver 🤯
• My 6 year startup journey automatically pouring beer (a story for another series of posts)
• Multiple web-servers for home automation
  • Counting pulses from an ESP sensing LED flashes from my electricity meter and hosting the analytics graphs
  • Sensing my doorbell ringing and sending me a telegram when it did
  • Watching my parents' garage through a camera to see whether I had left it open and sending me a telegram when it opened and closed
• A web-sockets based web-app to track the goals and assists for my weekly 5-a-side football game, with leaderboards and realtime updates
• An accounting platform for a startup, supporting automatic payouts and invoice generation
• Home-Assistant

Suffice to say, I am a fan. But all good things must come to an end, and in 2025 I finally ran out of storage on my Google account and had to buy a 100GB subscription. The cost is reasonable, but at that moment I realised that I would need to pay Google every month of my life until I die. This couldn't stand.

Enter Immich, the self-hosted Google Photos replacement that would free me from a lifetime of monthly payments. But alas, forum posts said that the Raspberry Pi was a little underpowered for the task. So, facing a mounting pile of loose Raspberry Pis on my shelf and loath to add another, I decided it was time to get serious. It was time to HomeLab.

I bought myself an Intel N150 based miniPC which, dear reader, you are reading this on right now. How did I get to this point? What am I going to do with it next? Follow along to find out!