Welcome to Realm Labs — my home lab, project archive and slightly over-engineered corner of the internet.
It’s where I document the systems I build, the things I experiment with, the problems I inevitably create along the way, and how I eventually get them working.
What began with a few Raspberry Pi projects has gradually grown into a complete home infrastructure covering virtualisation, networking, storage, automation, self-hosting, Windows domains, monitoring and local AI.
Rather than keeping all of that knowledge scattered across old notes, browser bookmarks and forgotten forum posts, Realm Labs became the place to document it properly.
Built, Not Just Written About
Everything on Realm Labs comes from something I’ve actually built, configured, tested or broken myself.
That includes things like:
- Proxmox virtualisation and home lab infrastructure
- Docker and Portainer
- Synology NAS storage and services
- Windows Active Directory and Group Policy
- Home Assistant and Node-RED automation
- Raspberry Pi and electronics projects
- Networking, VPNs and remote access
- Monitoring with Grafana and Prometheus
- Self-hosted applications and web services
- Local AI and custom software
The guides are written from the point of view of actually doing the work — including the parts that didn’t go according to plan.
More Than a Home Lab
Some of my favourite projects are the ones where infrastructure and imagination overlap.
Realm Labs has become home to projects such as a Raspberry Pi-powered Model TARDIS, a custom Top Gear-style sim racing leaderboard, smart home automation, locally hosted dashboards and experiments with KITT/KARR-inspired artificial intelligence.
Some projects are useful.
Some are completely unnecessary.
Those are often the most fun.
Why Realm Labs Exists
Technology has always been more interesting to me when I can take it apart, understand how it works and then build something with it.
The best lessons usually come from troubleshooting the things that don’t work first time.
That means Realm Labs isn’t intended to present a perfectly polished lab where everything magically works. Where useful, I document the failed attempts, strange behaviour, configuration mistakes and fixes as well.
If I’ve spent several hours figuring something out, there’s a good chance it will eventually end up documented here.
Partly so somebody else might find it useful.
And partly so I can remember what I did six months later.
The Lab Keeps Evolving
Realm Labs is never really finished.
New services appear, hardware gets replaced, IP addresses inevitably change, projects become unnecessarily complicated and occasionally something gets rebuilt simply because there was a more interesting way to do it.
That’s part of the fun.
If you’re interested in home labs, automation, Raspberry Pi projects, networking, self-hosting, local AI or simply building things with technology, have a look around.
Welcome to Realm Labs.