Hands-on projects built inside Realm Labs, including Raspberry Pi systems, self-hosted applications, dashboards, automation, networking and experimental software.
I started controlling model lighting with a Raspberry Pi GPIO and relay, switching a McLaren light set between 5 V and 3.3 V at sunset. Adding a Mini DeLorean pushed the project towards an ESP32, MOSFETs, PWM dimming, MQTT and animated lighting effects.
How I made the KITT Control Centre match Proxmox LXC CPU, RAM and disk figures by combining prometheus-pve-exporter with node_exporter, Prometheus and PromQL.
I turned a spare Raspberry Pi 3 into a dedicated full-screen dashboard appliance using Debian, X, Openbox and Chromium. This is the complete setup, including autologin, startx, kiosk mode, display blanking and the Chromium keyring prompt that had to be fixed properly.
I wanted a cleaner way to deploy and recover Windows machines without carrying USB installers around. This is how I split PXE boot services onto a Raspberry Pi while keeping WinPE, Windows images and deployment files on my Synology NAS — including the DHCP, TFTP and port 69 problems I hit along the way.
A practical RealmLabs project exploring how to replace a relay-based model lighting setup with an ESP32 and MOSFETs for cleaner wiring, independent channels, dimming, breathing effects and future audio.
How I built a Knight Rider-inspired KITT smart home dashboard with Home Assistant controls, Piper TTS, wake-word voice interaction, a dedicated TTS server and a local Ollama AI fallback.
How I trained a custom KARR voice with Piper TTS, WSL and a GTX 1080 Ti, solved CUDA compatibility issues and exported it to ONNX.
After moving Node-RED from my Raspberry Pi to my Synology NAS, I realised there was one part of the setup I had not rebuilt. Manual control. Most of the models in the lab are already controlled using MQTT, including my…
Sometimes the smaller projects are the most enjoyable because they begin with a very specific problem and do not need to become anything larger. I wanted a browser-based retro gaming knockout tournament that could sit beside an arcade machine or…
I recently revisited the lighting setup on my Executor model. The original system worked, but it had evolved into several separate Python scripts for turning the LEDs on, turning them off and running a breathing effect. It was functional, but…