Homelab

Intermittent broadband faults are annoying because they are both obvious and hard to prove. When the internet disappears during a call or a movie, everyone in the house knows it happened. But by the time the provider asks for evidence, the connection is back, the router status page looks normal, and the conversation slides toward the usual script: reboot the router, check the WiFi, wait and see. My issue looked like the ONT going down periodically. Connectivity would disappear, then recover after roughly 10-20 minutes. I needed precise timings for Sky and Openreach, not a vague memory of “it was bad again this morning”. ...

My garden CCTV system started with a simple loop: Frigate detects movement, a Python script sends a Telegram notification, and I can look at a snapshot or short clip from my phone. That was good enough for real-time alerts. It was not good enough for history. Telegram is a terrible archive browser. It is excellent at interrupting me when something happens, but bad at answering questions like: What happened in the last two hours? Did I miss a person detection yesterday? Which clips exist for this camera? Can I open the full event without digging through chat history? So the next small project was obvious: keep Telegram as the notification surface, but build a proper CCTV history portal on the Raspberry Pi itself. ...

I run a Raspberry Pi 5 at home as part of my OpenClaw setup. It started as an OpenClaw node connected through an SSH tunnel, then became a garden CCTV box running Frigate and recording video clips. By this point it is a camera box, a Frigate server, a Hailo detector host, and a remote machine my AI assistant can inspect from Telegram. At least, that was the idea. After a recent OpenClaw update, the Pi still looked connected. It was visible in the gateway. It was paired. It had broad permissions. The UI suggested everything should work. ...

In my previous post I built a garden CCTV system using Frigate NVR on the Pi 5. It worked well — but the AI object detection was running on the CPU, consuming about 35% of a core just sitting there waiting for motion. I installed a Hailo-8L AI HAT to move that workload to a dedicated NPU, and the results were exactly what I hoped for. This post documents the migration: what the Hailo AI HAT is, how to install the driver (with the version pitfalls that will catch you), and how to wire it into Frigate. ...

In my previous post I connected a Raspberry Pi 5 to my AI assistant as a remote node. The natural next step: attach a camera and turn it into a proper garden security system — motion-activated, AI-powered, with notifications straight to Telegram. This post documents what I built: Frigate NVR running on the Pi 5, a Freenove 8MP camera module, automated clip retention, and a Python bot that sends snapshots to a private Telegram channel the moment something moves. ...

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) and decided to connect it to my OpenClaw setup as a remote node. The idea: give my AI assistant direct access to a physical machine sitting on my home network, so it can run commands there, monitor things, and eventually interact with hardware. This post documents how I did it, the pitfalls I ran into, and what I plan to use it for. ...