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Homelab Setup as of Jan 30th, 2026

It's almost been a year since my last update on what's changed with my Homelab. Time to update that.
I knew once I started this stuff I'd never get out of it.

You'll notice a lot of this has become "Ahh I really need this" to "Hey, can I do this?" and then impulsively purchase and do w/e the idea of the day is. But honestly learning more than what I thought out of it and having too much fun in the process.

Hardware

Server: ZimaBlade 7700
No changes and no complaints

PoE Switch: TP-Link TL-SG1008P
Already looking to expand...

Now to the fun stuff

Cameras: Reolink RLC-520A
These cameras are better than most businesses and schools. PoE and connected directly to home assistant (more below). Set up on my front porch and back porch. Frigate to serve for object detection, truly amazing. chefs kiss

Mesh WiFi: Motorola MH7023
Since I've started working on a laptop, I have the freedom to work on my back porch, but my poor AT&T router doesn't reach from my office to there. So rather than upgrade or move the router, let's just buy a whole mesh system for the house.

Entirely way too overkill for the house, but it's cool right?

Moisture Meter: Ecowitt GW1000 with WH51 Wireless Soil Moisture Meter
Because why not? It's in my garden and keeps me on track of watering. I've already got an automatic watering nozzle - thingy. But why not?

Software Stack

Base OS: CasaOS
This has primarily turned into the NAS only, previously I tried to use the UI that was provided for the containers, but bah-hum-bug it's not useful at all.

Container Management: Portainer
Portainer is still the backbone of the system. Probably won't change here.

Containers

1. Pi-hole

You know how nice it is to have the wife send me recipes and I'm not immediately spammed with ads? I can actually use those stupid sites now? Aside from ads, it's amazing how many trackers are now also blocked from the huge blocklist that I use. Now that I'm adding more hardware across the house, it's amazing how chatty everything is. Block block block block block block

JUNK

Junk! Be dumb! Not smart! My moisture meter should send me data, nobody else!

2. Home Assistant

Perfect perfect perfect perfect perfect! and it's only going to grow!

3. Frigate NVR

Local AI-powered camera recording and object detection for the cameras. Basically my own ring cameras, but I get to control it. Honestly one of the biggest draws for me getting my own cameras was to see how easy it was to setup object detection. I don't live in a bad part of town, moreso, I just wanted to have AI object detection on a camera... so I did it.

Features:

Downside: When the model is recording and detecting an object CPU spikes up to 60%+ from it's usual less than 5% šŸ˜¬. I looked into maybe coral has a solution for this? Decided to leave it as it is, but something to note for later.

4. Glance Dashboard

Unified home lab dashboard and my (pseudo) service monitoring. I say pseudo because previously I used Uptime Kuma, which is a proper program for monitoring, but I really didn't see a need for it for what I'm using. So I'll use the small widget that Glance provides for it. It's has become my homepage on my browsers, just a quick look (or glance) at everything before start surfing.

Features: