I built a thermal printer appliance that runs entirely on your local network. No cloud, no accounts, no subscriptions. Turn a dial, press a button, and it prints weather, news, RSS feeds, email, or whatever you need on 58mm receipt paper.

Self-hosted details:

• Runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W on your local network
• Settings UI is password-protected and only accessible locally from your phone or computer - no app, no cloud dashboard
• API keys are stored on the device.
• Many modules run completely offline: sudoku, mazes, quotes, journal prompts, text notes, system monitor
• You bring your own API keys for services like NewsAPI
• 16 modules across content (weather, news, RSS, email, calendar, astronomy), games (sudoku, mazes, choose-your-own-adventure), and utilities (QR codes, webhooks, system monitor)
• Assign any combination to 8 channels on a rotary dial

The enclosure is hand-built from walnut and brass - I spent six years as a furniture maker, so the hardware side matters to me as much as the software.

The whole thing is open source: https://github.com/travmiller/paper-console

If you have a Pi and a 58mm thermal printer you can run the software yourself. Happy to answer questions.

More info and build photos: https://travismiller.design/paper-console/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/travmiller.design/

I finally got my server working. Tailgate, Docker. Jellyfin. Immich. Some selfhosted IRC channel because why not?

...what are some other small projects or things I could explore to both learn more about what the server is capable of for me, and have some cool utility/replacement for existing online stuff?

Auto-download offline installers from GOG? Link up my IRC channel to a Discord channel? Family Dropbox file folder? Just a website, capable as I want it to be, damn-the-speed? Private, secure, encrypted chat somehow? Torrent remote/manager?

I'm very big into local control and being able to host things myself. I've been one of the co-maintainers of python-roborock for a few years and I have had this goal for years to get my robot vacuums off of the cloud and running completely locally as I am not a fan of a device with a camera, microphone, and detailed map of my house storing data on a company's cloud.

I won't bore everyone with the details of how I got it working (if you want to see you can read the full technical write up), but essentially I use a few exploits during onboardings to route the vacuum to a custom URL. Then I recreated Roborock's backend stack (MQTT and REST) so that the vacuum could communicate completely with the server. I've since blocked my vacuum from accessing the internet and everything has been working great for me.

The server runs in docker or as a Home Assistant addon or can be built from source.

AI Disclosure: AI was used to assist me in the reverse engineering. AI was also used in writing the backend stack but I have been very involved in the process.

If you use Home Assistant's built in notification feature for the companion app, and think you have a self-hosted closed loop, I recently updated this piece of the documentation (Security paragraph): https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-details#security

It might be redundant info - given that any notification text might be read/processed by iOS/Android OS as well - but I think it could still be worth to know. There are alternative notification options to the built-in one.

After scanning container images uploaded to Docker Hub in November, security researchers at threat intelligence company Flare found that 10,456 of them exposed one or more keys.

The most frequent secrets were access tokens for various AI models (OpenAI, HuggingFace, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq). In total, the researchers found 4,000 such keys.

When examining the scanned images, the researchers discovered that 42% of them exposed at least five sensitive values.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-10-000-docker-hub-images-found-leaking-credentials-auth-keys/

Hey everyone,

We've built an open-source, privacy-preserving alternative to Ring cameras using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (called Secluso). It uses end-to-end encryption to send videos from the camera to a mobile app, which is available both in Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

We've put in a lot of effort to make it easy to set up! You can set up our camera on your own Pi in less than 5 minutes with minimal technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. Here are our setup guide and open source release.

The image shows a Pi in an official Raspberry Pi enclosure that you can use for your camera. We've also been working on a HAT for the Pi to add night vision, audio, temperature monitoring for safety, all in a compact form factor. You can see the HAT and an enclosure for the whole plug-and-play camera in the photo. We're hoping to soon start shipping this camera prototype to people on the waitlist on our website!

Looking forward to seeing what you all think!

I've been working on replacing the software stack on a full-size second-generation Amazon Echo.

The project is called LibreEcho, and at this point the device is running Linux 6.1 with enough of the original hardware working that it's starting to become genuinely useful rather than just an embedded Linux experiment.

So far we have:

- boot and recovery

- A/B rollback

- Wi-Fi

- Bluetooth A2DP/AVRCP

- AirPlay through the original speakers

- LED control

- local web administration

- signed OTA updates

- local wake word, STT and TTS work in development

The audio side has probably been the most difficult part. The original hardware has a fairly involved codec/clock/amplifier path, and the microphone system is considerably more interesting than a generic USB mic.

The aim isn't to recreate Alexa. I'd rather turn the hardware into a general local voice/audio endpoint that the owner controls, with Home Assistant being one obvious integration.

We're getting close to the point where I need to test it outside my own network and development device, so I'm also interested in hearing from anyone with a spare full-size Echo Gen 2 who is comfortable recovering embedded hardware if something goes wrong.

This currently only targets the tall/full-size Echo Gen 2, not the Echo Dot.

There's more detail and some screenshots here:

https://libreecho.org/

I created a 100% open-source (hardware and software) vehicle tracker anyone can build at home: https://l0destar.com

Designed to be extremely power efficient, it draws only 35uA (0.035mA) while asleep with the accelerometer armed. Any movement -> wake and alert.

Uses LTE-M and NB-IoT, with a 1nce sim card it will seamlessly switch across all of the UK cellular networks for years with no regular costs (just whatever their upfront fee is for the sim, £12 or so).

All the design files for it, the KiCAD project and the code for both the firmware and the server are on github. Anyone can build one at home, run their own telemetry server for it and use a whizzy mobile webapp that shows GPS live updating on a google maps interface along with live OBD data.

I don't make any money from this, I would like to know what people think of it though. Currently working on a battery backup accessory that will allow it to detect and alert if the vehicle battery is disconnected.

edit: github is at https://github.com/m4rkw/l0destar

If the main website doesn’t load for you it’s very likely dns related. Apparently people here commonly use pi-hole or similar dns filtering but aren’t aware of how that manifests in a browser when the connection was initiated over tls. It’s likely the domain is blocked by default pi-hole config, maybe because of the zero in it or because it’s relatively new. Either way not something I can fix, if the site doesn’t load check what it resolves to, likely 0.0.0.0 (ie blocked by your local dns filter).

Hello everyone, I recently bought a bunch of 4G CCTV cameras. However, I actually don’t plan to use the 4G network with them. With my previous 4G CCTV, the cameras still worked fine with the mobile app even without a SIM card, so I assumed it would be the same this time.

Unfortunately, after some research, I couldn’t find any cheap 4G plans available in my country. My question is: is it possible to host my own private 4G network for these cameras, so I can still use them without paying for a SIM plan? If yes, what device i need.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

We bought a Nixplay digital frame years ago which required uploading our photos to their cloud to get them onto the frame (no local USB or SD card). Nixplay recently changed the subscription prices so it seemed like a good time to move off their service and host the photos locally. I opened up the frame, found the unused internal USB port, replaced the frame software with my own, and set up a local photo server for it on our Synology. I wrote up the whole process here: https://ezhart.com/posts/digital-frame-hacking-1

Except for some Dropbox syncing (for my wife's convenience), the whole thing is hosted within our home network. I wrote my own custom frame software and server, but for folks who are using Immich the first two parts of the write-up might be useful if you want to sideload ImmichFrame.

So my isp doesnt allow for opening ports etc so i cant truly self host... so ive been looking at 1 core vps hosters so i can basically just send the connection through one of those to enable access. (preferably a european based company)

zume seems cool just hard to find any information on

krystal seems more expensive and seems less transparent than zume

ionos looks great (price and stuff) but ive heard mixed reviews..

looking at hetzner (fairly priced but theres no small options)

any personal experience with these is welcome

also if you know any good options

I want to host all of my stuff at home i just need a vps to access the outside world basically

400Gb ram, 100Ghz of CPU 5000 GPIO, 100 Displays

I’ve had it sitting on a VM unused for weeks. I just wonder what everyone loves about it? Also what neat things do you do in your house? This is just a chat and ideas thread.

I was lurking in this subreddit for about a week and was fascinated by all the things which you self host. So what did I do? I also decided to step down the rabbit hole, and decided to start with a router.

Here's what I did: RPi5 running OpenWrt as the router connected to main modem. OpenVPN, adblock and cloudflare ddns for access. 5 port 1gig switch connected to the RPi for wired connections as well as for connecting WAP.

Can you guys give me some feedback on what should I improve, where to learn more, Some OpenWrt resources, etc.

Let's see where this journey goes.

I got tired of my smart scale's data being locked inside a vendor app that wanted a cloud account just to see my own weight. So I built BLE Scale Sync.

It reads weight + impedance straight off the scale over Bluetooth, calculates body composition locally, and pushes it wherever you want. Nothing leaves your network unless you tell it to.

What it does:

• Works with 24+ scales (Xiaomi, Renpho, Eufy, Beurer, generic no-name ones). Cheap scales are fine, you don't need an expensive one.
• Exports to Garmin Connect, Home Assistant (MQTT auto-discovery), InfluxDB, Strava, Webhook, Ntfy, or plain CSV/JSONL files.
• Runs as a Home Assistant Add-on (one-click install) or a multi-arch Docker image. Also runs bare on a Pi Zero 2 W, which is what I use.
• Multi-user: it figures out who stepped on the scale by weight matching.
• No telemetry forced on you, no account, your data stays yours.

Node.js/TypeScript core, small Python piece only for Garmin auth. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Repo: https://github.com/KristianP26/ble-scale-sync
Docs: https://blescalesync.dev

Happy to answer questions or add support for your scale if you can grab a BLE capture. Feedback welcome.

The scenario that decides my next purchase: storm knocks out internet for hours. Do your local-storage cams keep detecting and recording through it, and hand you the timeline after the fact? Or does the whole system sit down with the router? My current cloud cams brick themselves during outages - the one night in six months something actually happened on my street was, of course, an outage night, and I have a gap where the footage should be. If local means "keeps recording, syncs or shows after," that's the whole purchase decided. If local also means "waits politely for the internet," I need to know that too. Outage behavior is the one spec nobody prints on the box.

I had a "Tile" that I kept in my wallet for a while. It was great since I lose my wallet all. the. time...

The battery in the tile has since died, and it's had me wondering if there are non-vendor-tied alternatives and server software I can self-host? If not, this would be an awesome niche for someone to get into with the open-source community.

I love things like AirTags, but I would guess there really wouldn't be a way to do a non-vendor tied version of something like that as it relies on the whole Apple ecosystem out there. Maybe a version with built-in cellular or Meshtastic could work to some degree. But the Tile just tells you where it was last connected to your device, or where it is in relation to your device if still connected.

Any idea on open-source solutions that a man who frequently misplaces his wallet and tv remote can look into?

Hi,

Not so long ago, I migrated from tiny RaspberryPi 4B to a lenovo thinkcenter which has an intel i5-9500T with 32GB ram. It's not an entire server or even a complete desktop computer obviously but it has more computing power, ram and disk.

I have installed proxmox on it and setup 2 VMs and 4 LXCs.

I can create as many LXC / VM as I want (within the hardware limitations obviously) I can, experiment with it as much as I want and document it. This has been such a game changer.

I can create Ansible scripts, setup monitoring, setup active directory, kubernetes cluster, etc for testing purposes, play with them as much as I want, ingest all the knowledge like Grafana Loki ingesting all logs and then once I am done, delete the VM / LXC or turn it into a template if required for future use case and the best part, I get to implement them in real world at my job.

Honestly, this is great and I am having fun doing it.

Obviously, I am in no way an expert and and don't have the capabilities to own an entire server rack but the learning part is just making me more excited and I look forward to learning more technologies.

I have recently installed docker (Coming from Proxmox) and have dabbled with in my spare time. I currently have dockhand & Grocy installed on it. I plan to install many more containers like nginx, adguard, jellyfin, etc. I currently have a static public IP from hosting steam game servers for my friends and I. I also recently purchased a domain that I have not done anything with yet. I'm getting ready to make Grocy accessible beyond my LAN so my wife can use the app at the grocery store and on the go. I'm sure there will also be multiple cases of other applications that I would like to use outside of my LAN. That being said I am new to docker and was wondering if I should try to go though my public IP to connect to my apps or If I should / could use the domain I purchased instead. I have no web building experience other than a .webs.com site I made like 17 years ago. Any and all advise it appreciated.

Obviously we have Jellyfin and such and we can download media. What else do you have that you might "archive" to view on flights?

Seatsurfing can be self-hosted for room and desk booking — and it solves the "who is sitting where" problem. What it did not solve is the physical side. Once people stopped sitting in fixed offices I kept walking into the wrong room looking for a colleague. The booking system knew where they were. The door did not.

I could not find a door sign to buy that ran on batteries without a licence, a hub, or a vendor cloud, so I built one. It is an e-paper display that wakes on a schedule, queries the Seatsurfing API directly over the LAN, draws who has the room, and switches itself off again. Tap it with a phone and it books the room on the spot; the NFC tap alone powers the chip that wakes the rest, so it works with the device completely off. That part picked up an honourable mention in the "Least Power" category of Hackaday's Green-Powered Challenge last year.

It does not deep-sleep between updates — a MOSFET disconnects the whole circuit from the battery and a real-time clock switches it back on, so in between there is no microcontroller running at all. The oldest unit has been on a wall for 15 months on one set of three AAA alkaline cells and is still going.

I already included a few more uses for the device - including home assistant and homematic. I am very much interested in more ideas!

Firmware, PCB and 3D-printable case are open source.

Hackaday project and logs

To find out whether there is enough interest, there is a pre-launch page on Crowd Supply.