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Introduction

In the first part of this series, I covered the significant infrastructure upgrades to my home lab, including new compute hosts, a transition to TrueNAS, and a full networking overhaul. These foundational improvements paved the way for more advanced smart home and media setups. In this post, I’ll dive into the enhancements I’ve made to my smart home ecosystem, including a Voron 3D printer build, Plex server upgrades, and some security system improvements. These changes have not only improved my home’s functionality but also streamlined control and automation across the entire environment.

Voron 2.4R2 3D Printer Build

While working on the lab overhaul, I also took the time to build a new 3D printer, as I was starting to print with ABS and ASA and the Ender 3, I have slowly been upgrading for the last 5 years and wasn’t cutting it anymore. It took a lot of time to get it running properly, but I learned a lot about it throughout it all, plus got some good opportunities to put my novice soldering skills to the test.

• Why Voron?
  • The Voron 3D printer is known for its reliability, precision, and high-speed capabilities. Given the extensive customization options and the community support, it was the perfect fit for my needs. Because it is a custom-built printer using Klipper, it also means there are lots of mods and customizations available.
• Building the Voron
  • Building the entire printer took several months to just get mostly working, then a few more to iron out some small kinks. For starters, I found some kits on Amazon and used a large cardboard box and some glue sticks to get just enough parts printed on the Ender 3 so that I could assemble the base printer. From there, I used the printer itself to print the remaining parts and replace some of the lower-quality Ender 3 printed parts.
• Mods
  • Once functional, I slowly added various mods, most of them being QOL-based, including:
    • Noctua 40×20 fans for the stepper drivers
    • A cooling fan and heatsink for the Raspberry Pi 4
    • TMC2240 stepper drivers for the A/B and z-axis motors
    • OptoTap for easy and reliable z-homing and calibration
    • Sensorless x/y homing
    • Phaetus Rapido HF hotend for higher flow rates and faster prints
    • Stealthburner and CW2 tool head for better cooling and nozzle LEDs
    • 270-degree door hinges
    • Nevermore StealthMax air filter (currently in final programming/assembly)
    • Spoolman integration
    • GitHub integration to backup configuration files and track changes
    • Logitech webcam for remote and AI print monitoring
    • Chamber thermistor for heat soaking
    • Chamber lighting for night-time printing
• Post-Build Performance
  • Now that it is fully functional, the Voron is quickly becoming a workhorse for me, allowing me to easily print things like Raspberry Pi cases and light switch covers for various home projects.

Resin Printing with AnyCubic

Alongside the Voron, I also picked up an AnyCubic Mono X2 resin printer and Wash and Cure Plus on sale to expand my 3D printing capabilities. This addition has opened up new possibilities for high-detail prints, particularly for smaller, more intricate models. While the Voron lives in my office, the AnyCubic lives in the garage as I don’t use it as often and the fumes are much worse.

• Why a Resin Printer?
  • Resin printers are known for producing high-resolution prints with fine details, making it ideal for projects that require precision and smooth surfaces, such as figurines, prototypes, and complex parts.
• Why the Garage?
  • As I said, fumes are much worse than with FDM printing, even when adding a carbon filter. Additionally, there is a lot more post-processing work with resin prints. Having the resin printer in the garage allows me to put it on its own workbench in a space that is much emptier than any of the rooms in my home.

Media Server Upgrade

With the lab’s infrastructure now optimized for higher performance, one glaring flaw stood out in the new infrastructure: my media server performance. This meant one thing: it was time for some changes specific to said server.

• Changing Media Server Application Location
  • Over the years, I have built up a collection of roughly 3 TB of media, mainly from DVRing over-the-air broadcasts and finding cheap, used Blu-Rays that I’ve then digitized and put into storage. While CPU transcoding on Ryzen chips is pretty good, I have a water-cooled 4080 in my gaming PC that does not see much use. It also has newly added AV1 encoding support, meaning that so long as I’m not watching media while also gaming, I have a major source of horsepower not being used. So, my former media server no longer runs Plex, it just acts as a file server, and my gaming PC now runs Plex.
• New HDHomeRun Tuner
  • The OTA tuner I inherited was old from a family member. An HDHomeRun Dual to be specific. While it can handle 2 streams at once and do so with relatively high quality, it no longer receives firmware updates, has a lot of random stutters, and is really beginning to show its age. So, I replaced it with an HDHomeRun Flex 4K. This means not only can I handle 4 streams at once, but as channels around me begin to upgrade to 4K quality, I will be able to stream and record at this resolution.
• New Attic-Mounted Antenna
  • For the longest time, I used a cheap RCA-brand leaf-style antenna I found at Walmart. While it worked great when I lived in the middle of the DFW metroplex, it has struggled ever since I moved further into the suburbs. In order to combat this, I mounted a multi-directional high-gain antenna in my attic crawlspace. While I don’t get any additional channels, I get a much stronger signal and fewer picture issues.
• Retirement of File Server
  • This one is actually a work-in-progress at the time of writing, bottlenecked by Veeam restore speeds. After a lot of back-and-forth about it, I have decided to retire the file server and run the media server off a TrueNAS-presented SMB share. Not only is it one less server to patch and fewer resources consumed in the lab, but it also gives me a chance to finally get some hands-on time with Veeam’s NAS backup capabilities. Theoretically, because there are less layers involved, I should see better IOPS performance as well.

Unifi Security

Ring and Arlo have started to get on my nerves, specifically their cameras. They do not continuously record, which means they constantly miss some or all of the moments that should be recorded. In addition, they keep disconnecting from Wi-Fi despite being located near access points. One camera also died after only a year of use and another is stuck in night vision mode, which doesn’t even work well enough to capture anything on the ground less than 2m in front of it. There have also been some break-ins in the neighborhood where thieves have used signal jammers or even cut internet lines to stop cameras from uploading. So, it was time to try something different. Thus, I started installing Unifi cameras, with some help from the lab rack.

• Prepping for Cameras
  • First off, I needed a UNVR to locally store data. So, I opted for the UNVR Pro, finding some cheap re-certified 12 TB surveillance drives. I installed 5 and placed them in RAID-10. This means I have about 24 TB available for continuous recording, with the option to easily add another 12 by installing 2 more drives.
  • With storage in place, I needed a way to power most of the cameras, as all but the doorbell would be PoE. So, I decided to stick with Ubiquity for simplicity and picked up a USW-48-PoE. This also allowed me to move a few copper devices like the OTA tuner off the Dell switch and leave some open ports for future 10 Gb devices.
  • Rather than go for a cloud key to manage the switch, I decided to build a Ubuntu VM in the lab to act as a Unifi Controller. With this in place, I can eventually replace the Asus APs with Ubiquity ones and segregate my smart home/IoT devices onto their own networks.
• Installing the Cameras
  • The doorbell was for the most part the easy device. Being the only wireless device, I just had to install it in place of my existing Ring doorbell, which went to my grandmother as she had just moved into a new house and only wanted a smart doorbell to see who was on her porch when it rang. I did have to upgrade my transformer, as 16v 10va was enough to power the doorbell, but not enough to make the original chime work properly. A quick swap with a 16v 30va transformer fixed the problem.
  • For the cameras, it has been an ongoing game of waiting for the proper weather, where I can be outside in dry conditions to mount the cameras, while also having it be the right temperature to be in my attic for extended periods, to run Cat 6 cabling from the garage to the other sides of the house. With some help of fish tape and an endoscope, I’ve gotten pretty good at feeding cables. Only about half of the cameras have been installed so far, in the areas where old cameras did not have coverage. Some Arlo cameras still need to come down, but at least during the day, cameras have a 360-degree view of my property now.
• Initial Impressions
  • While it takes more work than Wi-Fi cameras, the expense is not nearly as much as I expected. While I did have to invest in a PoE switch and the UNVR, I could have cut costs significantly by using PoE injectors, the 1U NVR, and smaller drives. The cameras themselves cost pretty much the same as high-quality Wi-Fi cameras and a large spool of Cat 6 was incredibly cheap at the hardware store. Despite my old cameras being marketed as 4K, the resolution is noticeably better, even when loading local recordings off an Arlo base station. The night vision looks much crisper, though currently there are only cameras in areas which have some light from porch lights, driveway lights, and streetlamps. I’ll be curious to see how the 21m night vision claims hold up in darker areas like the rear of my house.
  • Unlike Ring, I also like that my recordings are all stored locally. This was true for Arlo, but my only option was an SD card with no resiliency. I also struggled with getting the base station to read anything larger than a 256 GB card.

I haven’t seen much noticeable improvement from the media server changes, in part because while I have a lot of content, I tend to only watch things on the server when streaming services or my internet provider has outages. On the other hand, the Voron printer and Unifi cameras see constant use. In part 3, I’ll be covering my experiences with Proxmox, as I just rebuilt my home lab to leverage it in preparation for the VBR 12.2 release, which came out the morning of me writing this. Part 4 I’ll give an overview of some AI workloads I have built and the various projects and automation I’ve built in Home Assistant to tie everything around the house together to truly make my home “smart”.