Raspberry Pi guides for every generation, from Pi Zero edge deployments through Pi 4 homelab clusters to the Pi 5 as a legitimate server platform. Covers OS selection and flashing, headless setups, GPIO projects, network appliances like Pi-hole and WireGuard, Kubernetes on ARM, and the small set of operational habits that keep SD cards from dying. The Pi is the single most underrated way to learn production infrastructure skills without a production budget. Every guide here is built on hardware we own and use daily. If you want practical Pi projects that teach real skills rather than just demonstrate the hardware, start here.
Uptime Kuma: Know When Things Break Before Anyone Tells You Here’s a question that changed how I think about my homelab: if Pi-hole goes down at 2am, how would you know? Not how would you fix it — how would you even know it happened? You’d wake up, your family would complain that the internet […]
Uptime Kuma on Raspberry Pi 5: Self-Hosted Monitoring That Builds SRE Skills Read More »
Ollama on Raspberry Pi 5: Run Local AI Models on Your Own Hardware Let me set expectations immediately: a Raspberry Pi 5 is not going to replace ChatGPT. It’s not going to run Llama 3 70B. It’s not going to generate images or do real-time voice transcription at any useful speed. What it will do
Ollama on Raspberry Pi 5: Run Local AI Models for Data Sovereignty and Career Growth Read More »
Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi 5: Event-Driven Architecture That Gets You Hired I’m going to let you in on a secret: the career reason to run Home Assistant has almost nothing to do with home automation. Home Assistant is an event-driven platform with a REST API, a WebSocket API, hundreds of integrations, a state management
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Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Proper URLs and SSL for Your Homelab You’ve got Docker running. Portainer’s giving you visibility. Pi-hole’s cleaning up your network. And you’re accessing everything by typing IP addresses and port numbers into a browser like it’s 2003. http://192.168.1.100:8080 for Pi-hole. https://192.168.1.100:9443 for Portainer. Whatever port your next service
Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Reverse Proxy Setup Guide with SSL Read More »
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: Network-Wide Ad Blocking and DNS You Control Of all the projects in this series, Pi-hole delivers the fastest return on investment. Not in some abstract career-value sense — in the “my partner just thanked me for making the internet less annoying” sense. Within ten minutes of pointing your router at
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: DNS Ad Blocking Setup Guide with Docker Read More »
Portainer on Raspberry Pi 5: See What Your Containers Are Actually Doing There is a moment in every homelab journey where you realise you have lost track of what is running. You SSH in, type docker ps, and stare at a wall of truncated container names, port mappings, and status fields that tell you technically
Portainer on Raspberry Pi 5: See What Your Containers Are Actually Doing Read More »
Docker on Raspberry Pi 5: Your Foundation for Everything Else Every other project in this series runs on Docker. The reverse proxy, the monitoring, the DNS, the automation platform, the AI models — all of it. Docker is not one of the ten projects. It is project zero. The foundation that everything else sits on.
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Why Docker on a Raspberry Pi Makes Sense I have three Raspberry Pis running Docker in my homelab. One handles DNS and ad blocking, another runs monitoring and a dashboard, and the third runs Listmonk for newsletter management. They draw about 5 watts each, run silently, and cost less than a month of any cloud
How to Install Docker on Raspberry Pi (2026 Guide) Read More »
A Minecraft Server That Costs 5 Watts One of the most common questions I see in homelab communities is whether a Raspberry Pi can run a Minecraft server. The honest answer: it depends on which Pi and how many players you expect. A Pi 4 can do it. A Pi 5 can do it properly.
How to Set Up a Minecraft Server on Raspberry Pi Read More »
How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux) Before I set up proper internal DNS, DuckDNS was the glue holding my remote access together. I had a Raspberry Pi running a handful of services at home, a residential IP address that changed every few days, and no interest in paying
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