How to find your homelab's real power draw and turn it into honest dollar figures: plug meters, Tasmota smart plugs, used enterprise PDUs, CT-clamp monitors, the Home Assistant energy dashboard, and the math from watts to your actual marginal rate.
Home-Assistant
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Measuring What Your Homelab Actually Costs -
Frigate: AI-Powered NVR Frigate is a self-hosted, open-source NVR that runs real-time object detection locally using dedicated AI accelerators — no cloud subscription, no footage leaving your network, and sub-second alerts when the model is tuned correctly.
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Home Assistant OS Deep Dive A thorough guide to Home Assistant OS: the add-on ecosystem, automations and blueprints, Zigbee2MQTT, Z-Wave JS, ESPHome device integration, local voice assistants with Whisper and Piper, the energy dashboard, and remote access options.
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ESP32 and MicroPython for the Homelab: Custom Sensors and Home Assistant Integrations from Scratch The software engineer's entry point into microcontrollers: choosing the right ESP32 variant, flashing MicroPython, wiring up real sensors, publishing to MQTT, and integrating with Home Assistant — plus when to use ESPHome instead.
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Home Assistant: The Local-First Smart Home That Actually Respects Your Privacy A comprehensive guide to Home Assistant — the open-source, local-first home automation platform. Covers installation, Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter hardware, ESPHome, automations with real YAML examples, Lovelace dashboards, presence detection, templates, and security best practices for homelabbers who want control and reliability over cloud-dependent solutions.