Raspberry Pi MQTT monitoring is a simple way to bring useful system health data into Home Assistant without installing a full monitoring platform on every device. In Realm Labs, Raspberry Pi systems often sit in the background running automation, scripts,…
Some of the best home lab problems are the ones that look completely ridiculous once you finally understand what happened. This was one of them. During the earlier versions of my Raspberry Pi TARDIS project, Node-RED was responsible for triggering…
Raspberry Pis are brilliant little machines, but after you’ve used one for a few years, they tend to accumulate jobs. A script gets added here. A cron job gets added there. A sound file lives in one directory. Node-RED controls…
One of the bigger changes in Realm Labs was moving Node-RED away from a Raspberry Pi and into a more centralised setup. At first, Node-RED had been running directly on the Pi because it was convenient. The Pi already handled:…
One of the more misleading problems I’ve hit in the Realm Labs setup started with Docker. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. I was trying to pull an image on one of my Raspberry Pis and Docker simply…
The Raspberry Pi at the heart of my smart TARDIS project has gone through a few different roles. Originally, quite a lot of the automation ran directly on the Pi. As the wider home lab developed, the predictable scheduling and…
Changing the static IP address of a Raspberry Pi is straightforward when NetworkManager is managing the Ethernet connection. This guide covers changing the Pi from 192.168.68.88 to 192.168.68.30 while keeping the existing DNS server at 192.168.68.20. Before You Start Make…
Raspberry Pi systems are useful little machines for homelab work, especially when you want to run lightweight services without dedicating a full desktop or server to the job. In Realm Labs, Raspberry Pi devices are used for a mixture of…
A Raspberry Pi is one of the easiest ways to add a small Linux system to a homelab. In Realm Labs, Raspberry Pi devices are used for automation, monitoring, MQTT, GPIO projects and other lightweight services. Most of them run…
Some of the most rewarding technology projects are the ones where engineering meets something completely unnecessary but genuinely fun. The Realm Labs TARDIS started as a static display model and gradually evolved into a network-connected automation project with programmable lighting,…
