Turning a Raspberry Pi into an ESP32-C3 Programmer and Debug Console
Using a Raspberry Pi as a permanent UART console and serial programmer for an ESP32-C3, with BOOT control, esptool flashing, stale-build protection and post-flash verification.
Category Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi projects and guides covering GPIO, MQTT, automation, monitoring, custom applications and experimental builds.
Turning a Raspberry Pi 3 into a Lightweight Full-Screen Kiosk with Debian, Openbox and Chromium
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.
Building a Raspberry Pi PXE Server with Synology NAS Storage for Windows Deployment
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.
Building a Smarter Model Lighting Controller with ESP32 and MOSFETs
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.
Raspberry Pi MQTT Monitoring with Home Assistant
Monitor Raspberry Pi CPU, memory, disk, temperature and uptime in Home Assistant using Python and MQTT, with current Paho 2.x guidance and stale-data protection.
When Node-RED Tried to Execute a WAV File as Python
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…
Rebuilding a Raspberry Pi Without Rebuilding the Entire Automation System
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…
Migrating Node-RED from a Raspberry Pi Without Losing Its Hardware Functions
This guide shows how to migrate Node-RED Raspberry Pi hardware without losing GPIO, audio or local Python control. I moved the automation logic into a central Docker setup and left a lightweight MQTT agent on the Pi. At first, Node-RED…
When DNS Broke Docker on My Raspberry Pi
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…
Configuring the Raspberry Pi as a TARDIS Hardware Controller
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…