Hi, I’m Piyush 馃憢馃徎
I’m a software engineer based in Boston. This is my place away from work where I share my hobby experiences in self-hosting, 3D printing, home automation, and open source software.
Never Miss a Delivery Again: Building a Package Alert
TL;DR: A package got stolen from my apartment lobby. No camera, no delivery API, no tracking webhook. So I built my own. Change Detection polls the carrier鈥檚 public tracking page every five minutes, publishes a message over MQTT when the status changes, and Node-RED routes that message to every Google Home speaker in my apartment. The moment a package is marked delivered, the speakers announce it. The Problem It finally happened to me. ...
Buying vs Building an Ambient Sensor
TL;DR: I wanted temperature and humidity monitoring in two rooms. Rather than buy two sensors, I bought one (the Govee H5075) and built the other myself using an ESP32 and DHT22. The bought sensor was working in fifteen minutes. The built one took days of prototyping, CAD work, and print iterations. Both ended up on my Home Assistant dashboard side by side. One path was fast and cheap. The other was a rabbit hole I thoroughly enjoyed falling into. ...
Inside My Proxmox Home Lab: Two Nodes, Endless Possibilities
TL;DR: A two-node Proxmox setup powers my home lab. One node runs all my services and experiments, the other acts as a NAS. I keep things organized with VM-based IPs and rely on automated backups so I can tinker without worrying. Introduction Welcome to a tour of my Proxmox home lab! In this post, I鈥檒l walk you through all the services I run across my two-node cluster. Everything here is deployed using the excellent Proxmox Helper Scripts, which I rely on not just to spin up containers quickly but also to discover new services to experiment with. ...
Goodbye Raspberry Pi, Hello Proxmox
TL;DR: Upgraded from a single Raspberry Pi to a multi-node homelab featuring 3x HP ProDesk Mini PCs and a Lenovo ThinkCentre, running Proxmox for virtualization with Tailscale VPN for remote access. One node serves as a Windows 11 Pro workstation, while the other two form a Proxmox cluster for running self-hosted services and NAS. The Journey Begins This is my second attempt at building a homelab. My first setup was a single Raspberry Pi running a few containers, but it quickly hit its limits. This time, I鈥檓 scaling it into a more structured setup and documenting the journey along the way. ...