Projects

Home Lab

My pride and joy.

I built it to satisfy multiple needs, number one being the obvious reason knowledge and experience. Being self-taught it can be difficult to prove to others the things I know, and what better way to prove knowledge than to put it into practice?

I built my home lab from my old computers, which I then installed Proxmox on and turned into a cluster. After that, I set up an OPNsense VM on my main Node in the cluster. I wanted to use it as my home router, this allowed me to bypass the modem provided by my ISP and truly secure my network.

Now, that sounds easy, but I have FTTH, so now I needed a Programable XGPON to be able to bypass the modem, once again no problem, but now I need a dual 10G SFP+ NIC for my WAN and LAN ports in my OPNsense router. So I headed over to eBay and pick one up, installed that and passed the PCIe device through to the OPNsense VM, and bam there we go.

Okay, so now I have FTTH direct into the programmable XGPON in my server cluster, what now? I needed to deliver this new clean, secure and without speed limitations the modem provided very fast internet to my network.

Here come the switches, well this was a future-proofing project, so yeah. I picked up some 8 port 2.5G managed switches that came with a 10G SFP+ port. This was perfect, 10G out from the OPNsense router direct to the 10 port on the switch via DAC cable, clean and simple. Then I made a virtual LAN port inside the OPNsense VM to connect the node the NIC was installed in, and the other nodes were then connected to the switch.

After this, I ran CAT6E through the walls of my house to the living room and office and crimped some wall jacks to directly connect the main devices. The living room has my media cabinet with all the high-resource equipment in it, so that’s where I installed another one of the switches I bought. That coupled with a Wi-Fi 6E AP to replace the Wi-Fi I lost when I removed the modem from my ISP.

Random

3D Printers

Yeah, I went there. I wanted to learn about 3d printing, and you know what, how hard could it be, really?

Well, it was very easy, turns out you can grab a 3D printer off a shelf and screw 4 bolts in and there you go, grab a file off a source site and print it. Cool.

Alright that’s all fine and dandy, but why are off the shelf printers so slow and limited, this is where the rabbit hole opened for me. I started doing the research and turns out the best way to improve speed, print quality and over all performance, was, well yeah, you guessed it custom design and build your own 3D printer.

So, I figured out the most the parts that were common in high end 3D printers and I added them to a build list, I researched the best control boards, stepper motors, stepper drivers and learned what the frustrating difference between TR8*8 and TR8*4 leadscrews was.

So, now with this information I had a game plan to put into place. I ordered the components and with the off the shelf printer I needed to print some parts to mount the components and anchor the chassis together.

Next problem to overcome, I needed parts that didn’t exist on source sites, but I know how I wanted them look and work. I needed to learn CAD in order to design and then print the parts I need. Thankfully OnShape and fusion360 exists for people like me. With these programs and an another stack of books, I now had the skills I needed to be able to design the parts, I imagined in order to build the custom 3D printer, I designed.

Now 3 years later I have 3 custom built 3d printers and I use them daily at work to print all the plastic parts we used to have to buy from suppliers, saving thousands of dollars every quarter. For example one part we used to buy cost 1700$ USD, which I design in OnShape and can print for 76$ CAD.

Future

This is going to need some popcorn.

So, this is where you come in. As a tech enthusiast who craves knowledge, I admittedly need help sometimes, but I’m not afraid to ask.

I want to be the best me I can be and to do that I need to be somewhere that encourages that mentality. I want my future projects to encompass not only my skills in advanced problem solving but to also really challenge me towards bettering myself and the people I work with.

My Grandmother always told me from a very young age that I had an old soul, and that I needed to use it to educate the people around me, and use it to empower teams, because when you can do this it will lead to bettering yourself.

I’m nothing if not a knowledge seeker and a team leader, but without a team to lead, the knowledge I seek is out of reach.

For my future projects, I want to run a team of like-minded tech-savvy individuals who like me want to wake up in the morning, secure the network, configure user devices and make everyone in the company feel confident with their setups.

Something as simple as resetting a VoIP phone for upper management who has a conference call in 10 minutes, or as complex and terrifying as the middle of the night phone call that the network is down and the file backup wasn’t completed.

Working with computers, networks, and electronics has always made sense to me, I have a kinship for it and it is for me, but it’s not that way for everyone. Most people are technophobic and don’t like change or don’t know what to do when they aren’t getting their emails on their phones.

Well I do and I want to be there, I want to help.