It’s that time of the week again, so let’s dive into three more fun homelab projects to try this weekend! Today, I’ll be talking about setting up a home energy usage monitoring system, a private Pastebin alternative, and a retro LAN party box!

Use Home Assistant to track your home’s energy usage

Energy monitoring smart plugs are only half the battle

I recently deployed an energy-monitoring smart plug to monitor how much electricity my homelab uses. However, that’s only the beginning of my energy monitoring journey.

You see, a homelab is the perfect place to fully track your home’s energy usage. I also have a whole-home energy monitoring solution that natively integrates with Home Assistant that I will be deploying soon.

Once you have Home Assistant running in your homelab, you can then start to aggregate and process energy usage from various sources. Some energy utilities allow you to scrape that data from them, while others (like mine) require you to gather it yourself.

So, I’ve started building out an energy monitoring dashboard in Home Assistant. It’s very simple right now because I only have a single smart plug deployed.

However, once I have the rest of the system in place, I’ll be able to see just how much money I’m spending on electricity throughout the house from things like lights, my refrigerator and freezer, and anything else.

If you’ve not thought about energy monitoring in your homelab yet, then this summer is the perfect time to deploy it. It’ll take a while to set up and get configured properly, but it’ll be worth it in the end. For systems like the one I have that go inside of the electrical panel, make sure to hire a licensed contractor if you’re not comfortable working with electricity.

Create a private pasting system to store and share text snippets

Pastebin and Gist are great, but not private

Credit: Pastefy

Years ago when I was doing Android ROM development, I used Pastebin and Gist all the time. These tools are fantastic and were crucial in my formative years as a developer for sharing snippets of text with other developers.

These days, however, there are much better tools for the job. Instead of using a public pasting site, which is definitely not advised if there are any API secrets or passwords in a paste, you can self-host a system instead. That’s where Pastefy comes in.

Pastefy is designed as both an online, publicly-available Pastebin alternative as well as a self-hosted solution if you’re wanting to host it on your own hardware. I’d definitely recommend self-hosting it.

Pastefy is pretty simple to deploy, as you can use Docker to launch it on your server. Once it’s live, you can start to throw your pastes into the system, and it’ll auto-detect what language it’s in and provide marked-up previews for things like Markdown, SVGs, CSVs, and more. Plus, it offers syntax highlighting for most languages.

So, if you’re still using a public pasting website for your code or homelab, then it’s time to switch to something a bit more private.

Get ready for game night with friends by building a retro LAN party box

A plug-and-play system for local multiplayer games isn’t hard to build

Credit: Activision

Sometimes you just want to kick back, relax, and enjoy some retro gaming with friends. I’m not talking about Pac-Man or those arcade classics here, I’m talking about modern classics like Call of Duty Modern Warfare (the original), Call of Duty World at War, Battlefield 2, Quake III Arena, Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Halo 2, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, or Minecraft.

There are so many other games that I could list, but this article would be way too long if I did that. However, the same technique that I’m going to talk about here likely applies to your favorite games.

You can use dedicated game server software like CubeCoder’s AMP, which is what I do when I need more advanced game server management. Pterodactyl would also be good. For many of these games, a simple SteamCMD automation setup would work well.

I’d start with spinning up Proxmox on whatever system you want to turn into a retro LAN party box so you can run multiple virtual machines. From there, get a few virtual machines running with various software on them, but Docker will likely be the root for everything. You’ll also want LANCache on one of the virtual machines with plenty of storage space.

With LANCache, you can keep the game itself downloaded on the server, so others can pull it from there instead of having to download from the internet.

Building a retro LAN party box like this will take some time to get properly set up, but it’ll be so worth it in the end. I still remember bringing my desktop to LAN parties at coworkers’ houses and having a blast playing so many games that way. There’s just something special about everyone being in the same room playing the same game that online multiplayer still can’t match.

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  Brand

  GEEKOM

  CPU

  AMD Ryzen 5 7430U

  Graphics

  AMD Vega 7

  Memory

  16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM

  Storage

  512GB NVMe (expandable)

  The GEEKOM A5 mini PC packs 16GB of user-replaceable RAM, a user-swappable NVMe SSD, plus two other storage slots, giving you plenty of user-upgradability in this compact system. The Ryzen 5 processor packs plenty of power for general tasks, and it’s even great at lightweight gaming and CAD work too.

  
  

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  Brand

  KAMRUI

  CPU

  AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS

  Graphics

  AMD Radeon 680M

  Memory

  16GB LPDDR5

  Storage

  512GB NVMe

  The KAMRUI Hyper H1 mini PC is perfect for setups that need a high-performance desktop without spending an arm and a leg. It boasts the AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS 8-core 16-thread processor and 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM (which is not user-upgradable). The pre-installed 512GB NVMe drive can be swapped out for a larger one though, and there’s a second NVMe slot for extra storage if needed.

  
  

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  Brand

  ACEMAGIC

  CPU

  Intel i9-13900HK

  Graphics

  Intel Iris Xe integrated, Intel Arc A770 dedicated

  Memory

  32GB, upgradable to 96GB

  Storage

  1TB

  This mini PC looks a bit different from the rest, and that’s for good reason. It features a desktop-like i9-13900HK processor that’s paired with a discrete Intel Arc A770 graphics card. That’s right, this mini PC has an actual GPU built-in alongside the integrated graphics that come baked into the i9-13900HK. Alongside that, there’s Windows 11 Pro, 32GB of RAM (which is user-upgradable up to 96GB), dual NVMe slots, and so much more. If you’re looking for the perfect workstation computer or homelab server, this could be it.

  
  

Not all homelab projects have to be productivity focused

While the first two projects in today’s roundup are geared toward productivity-type projects, the third is definitely designed around having fun. Having a homelab shouldn’t just be about making things “better” or faster or more productive.

One of my favorite things that I host in my homelab is game servers for friends, and building a LAN party box is a project that would be super fun to do. I don’t have any friends nearby to LAN party with anymore, but I still host online servers for them to use so we can all play in the same Minecraft or Satisfactory worlds.

So, stop keeping your homelab just for productive things. Have fun with it this weekend.