# Writing
Notes from running Kubernetes on bare metal at home, and what broke.
Incidents, upgrades and side projects from my homelab: what the symptom was, what I guessed wrong, and what fixed it.
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Claude made a screen frame from one request
AI has got decent at design and CAD.
DiffLab: a video studio for generated video on one graphics card
An open-source tool that turns an idea and a few photographs into a chapter of shots, on a single 24 GB card.
A stackchan mini robot
I got a small robot, and Claude is building its brains.
A smart speaker in two weekends
Ten years ago this took a whole team.
A home e-ink dashboard, built mostly by AI
I saw TRMNL and wanted one. A colour e-ink panel, a Rust backend in the homelab, and Claude doing most of the iterations.
Femto, my personal assistant with an attitude
I wanted an obedient script. I got a British butler who has run out of coffee.
kata-pulse: an evening project that got a little out of hand
I only wanted to play with Rust in the evenings. I ended up writing monitoring for Kata Containers.
VPN into my home network through Cloudflare
I do not want everything at home on the public internet, but I still want to reach it from my phone.
An ERCF v2 for the printer: the third device on the CAN bus
I built an automatic filament changer, and the printer looks more and more like a modern car.
Homelab updates: rook ceph instead of longhorn
Lighting in the rack, printed mounts, real nvme drives, and a backup I have not tested yet.
Everything runs at home now
Three mini PCs, k3s, and a cancelled server contract.
A Telegram bot that writes a digest of a busy chat
It runs as a userbot under my own account and uses a local Ollama, no clouds.
What runs on my 30-euro server
I do not like paying for cloud services I cannot take my data out of, so here is everything I host myself, and the few things I gave up on.
A KNOMI display, OTA updates and my first Rust project
I put a small display on the printer, contributed wifi updates to its firmware, and later wrote a flashing tool in Rust.
I almost coded a micro-SaaS over the weekend
A sync of bank transactions from European banks into YNAB.
Building a Voron 2.4
An open-source printer that is just a list of parts and a manual. Magic smoke on the first power-on, and a week lost to two swapped pulleys.
A new printer, and the list of things to redo on it
A z-bolt max arrived: corexy, hiwin rails, and an 8-bit board that I plan to replace with a duet wifi.
Fixing laser engraving speed in Marlin 2.0
Laser control in Marlin is thoroughly broken, so the laser now pretends to be a part cooling fan. Halftone photos work.
The laser works on the new board, and I broke the board twice
The servo outputs give a fine 5V PWM for the laser. The RURAMPS4D takes wrong polarity very badly.
Why you should not save money on a BLTouch clone
A Chinese 3D Touch gave me a 0.35 mm spread on the Z axis. The original gave 0.011.
TMC2130 drivers: the printer went silent
I finally swapped the stepper drivers, and the loudest thing left is the fan.
Creative disk layout on a home router
Building my own firmware for the router, I ran into a 4 GB eMMC that is almost unused.
Choosing a router: pick the firmware first
What I learned picking a replacement router, and what I found when I logged into the ZyXEL Armor Z2 over ssh.
A small CNC mill on 3D-printer electronics
I ordered a cheap desktop mill kit and decided not to use the dubious LPT drivers that came with it.
Swapping the printer's electronics: the plan, and a hole in the bed
Marlin 2.0, an Arduino Due with a RuRamps4D hanging on strings, and a PEI sheet melted right in the centre.
What I automate with IFTTT
A surprising number of things can be done with an old and well-known service.
New brains for the 3D printer
My 8-bit Arduino and RAMPS setup is too slow, so I ordered an Arduino Due, a RURAMPS4D and TMC2130 drivers.
The early end of the ZAPO router
A test clip, binwalk, a broken CLK pin and a replacement flash chip from AliExpress. It did not come back to life.
The SD card that died quietly
The memory card in my 3D printer's Raspberry Pi went read-only, and thanks to the write-back buffer I did not notice for a long time.
How I bricked the router while making a backup
Telnet, a cut-down busybox, a web server with a writable partition, and then a soldering iron.
A Chinese router with no alternative firmware
I bought a ZAPO 2600 gaming router from AliExpress, opened it up and found a serial console next to the processor.
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