Aswin's Homelab

A status page that survives its own death

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted a little green-dot status page for my home network — is the torrent box up, is the internet actually fast right now, when did that last outage start. BetterStack and friends do this beautifully, but it felt silly to pay a SaaS to watch a machine sitting three feet from me.

I pasted the same crypto into four sites. Then I stopped.

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every small site I self-host eventually needs the same boring thing: let me — and only me — sign in. A signed session cookie, a hashed password, an owner allowlist. Nothing novel; the same forty lines of Web Crypto I’d already written.

Torrents by Telegram: a login that lies, and a rename button wired to SSH

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The gadget: text a magnet link to a Telegram bot, and it queues the download on the qBittorrent box at home. /status shows progress, send a .torrent file and it uploads. The happy path is about ten lines of Pyrogram .

Tracking my own parcels: three carriers, three fights, one interface

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted one page where I could paste any tracking number — Blue Dart, Delhivery, whatever — and see where my parcel is, without bouncing between five courier sites that each look like they were built in 2009. Most of the “universal tracking” options are paid SaaS aggregators. For a handful of my own shipments, that’s absurd.

Good Night Alert: an ESP32, an LDR, and three bugs I didn't expect

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The idea was simple: when I turn off the bedroom tubelight at night, have Alexa say “Good night.”

The gadget is a weekend project. What actually took the time — and what’s worth writing down — was making it reliable: three separate bugs, each one a good lesson in “the tutorial never mentions this.”

A talking front gate: Sonoff door sensor → Alexa, and why it whispers at dawn

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Small, satisfying automation: when the main gate opens, an Amazon Echo announces “Door open.” Battery door sensor, no wiring, done in an evening. But two details make it pleasant to live with rather than annoying.

One automation to watch every battery sensor in the house

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The problem with battery-powered sensors is you forget they have batteries — until one dies silently and you notice a week later that a door or motion sensor stopped reporting. This is a single automation that checks them all, once a day, and only bothers me when there’s something to act on.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I run a self-hosted homelab on TrueNAS — media, home automation, a handful of containers and VMs — and I write up the parts that taught me something.

Most posts here are home-automation projects built on Home Assistant, ESPHome (ESP32 devices), and a TrueNAS box running Docker and libvirt containers. The gadgets are usually simple. The interesting part is almost always the reliability engineering around them — the bugs, the gotchas, and the design choices that make something you actually live with instead of a demo that breaks in a week.