HomeLab Infrastructure & IoT Edge Platform

Production homelab infrastructure powering day-to-day containerized workloads, telemetry pipelines, embedded IoT sensor networks, and real-time edge audio AI on a dedicated, security-hardened Linux host on-prem.

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Architecture Overview

                          Incoming LAN Traffic
                                    │
        ┌───────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┐
        │                      Traefik v3                       │
        │    (Ingress Router, TLS Termination, Service Proxy)   │
        └───────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘
                                    │
       ┌────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┐
       │                            │                           │
       ▼                            ▼                           ▼
 [ Core Services ]          [ Observability ]            [ IoT & Edge AI ]
 • Homarr Portal            • Prometheus Engine          • ESP32 Audio AI Server
 • Home Assistant           • Grafana Dashboards         • ESP32 Temp Telemetry
 • Pi-hole DNS Sinkhole     • Alertmanager Pipeline      • Tuya Energy Exporters
 • Uptime Kuma Health       • Gotify Push Webhooks       • SmartTube ADB Bridge
 • MantisBT + MariaDB       • System Metric Exporters    • AriaNg Web Client
 • Nginx HTTP/3 QUIC

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Key Engineering Pillars

1. Ingress & Edge Networking

• Traefik v3 Reverse Proxy: Label-driven dynamic container discovery with automated TLS termination and path-based routing.
• HTTP/3 QUIC Gateway: High-throughput Nginx reverse proxy with TLS 1.3 0-RTT session resumption for modern mobile clients.
• DNS Sinkholing: Pi-hole deployment handling network-wide ad blocking, privacy filtering, and internal .lan domain routing.

2. Full-Stack Observability & Incident Pipeline

• Host & Network Telemetry: Continuous monitoring across CPU, memory, disk I/O, ICMP round-trip latency, WireGuard VPN throughput, and network bandwidth.
• Automated Alerting: Alertmanager pipeline delivering instant push notifications to mobile devices via self-hosted Gotify instances.
• Unified Visuals: Grafana dashboards offering real-time visibility into infrastructure health and energy consumption.

3. Embedded Systems & Edge AI

• Real-Time Audio Event Detection:
  • Microcontroller Layer: ESP32-S3 firmware streaming 16kHz PCM audio from an INMP441 I2S MEMS microphone over WebSockets.
  • Dual Inference Pipeline: Python daemon evaluating incoming streams using Google YAMNet deep learning and sub-second SciPy cross-correlation signature matching.
  • Autonomous Action: Immediate dispatch of priority push notifications and Prometheus counter updates upon detection.
• Custom Hardware Exporters:
  • Standalone Prometheus exporters written in Go and Python to extract live power, voltage, and energy statistics from local Tuya smart plugs.
  • 1-Wire temperature sensing using DS18B20 microchips connected to an ESP32 with Prometheus scraping.

4. Container Security & Best Practices

• Docker Secrets by Design: Critical credentials (such as database passwords in MariaDB) are mounted as in-memory tmpfs files (/run/secrets/), completely preventing leakage via docker inspect metadata or process environment dumps.
• Zero Credential Exposure: Completely decoupled environment templates (.env.example) and comprehensive Git ignore hygiene.
• Submodule Portability: Uses relative Git submodule paths (../aria2.git) for universal anonymous and authenticated cloning.