A portfolio of my work can be found at http://www.endhousesoftware.com/projects/projects.htm, project blog at https://www.endhousesoftware.com/projectblog/projectblog.htm, Github Repository at https://github.com/gavinbaker999 and Docker Hub Repository at https://hub.docker.com/repositories/endhousesoftware.

My home lab network consists of two Raspberry PI 5 servers, both with attached 1TB M.2 drives. One Raspberry PI 5 server also has an attached 2TB USB drive that has various shares that can be accessed as a NAS. One Raspberry Pi 5 server contains a software development system for my NodeJs applications - primarily Chatter Box and the dymanic PHP part of my website - Ansible playbooks (to update configurations across groups of servers with one command). The other - with an attached camera module - includes as well as other bits, a testbed for my PyTorch/TensorFlow/CV2 image regcogntion projects. Both Pi 5 servers run common software, which includes amoung others, SyncThing, Portainer, Pi Cockpit, Obsidian, Git, Docker, VS Code and Libre Office.

My home lab also has a ZimaBoard 2 kick starter server to which two 2TB SATA III drive is attached and an USB WiFi dongle. The ZimaBoard 2 is a single board computer with an Intel Celeron N5105 CPU, 16GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage. It has two USB 3.0 ports, a newly upgraded PCIe 3.0 interface and the dual 2.5G Ethernet ports unlock greater hardware expansion possibilities and ultra-fast data transfer experiences. There is also a MiniDP 1.4 interface and the classic dual SATA interfaces allow ZimaBoard 2 to easily expand storage capacity. One of the USB ports is connected to a UGreen wireless adaptor and the other to the Coral TPU. The PCIe 3.0 inteface has an Oculink adaptor card which is connected to the GPU docking station, in which resides a RTX 5060 graphics card. The ZimaBoard 2 is a great addition to my home lab cluster as it will allow me to run more demanding applications and services, in my case mainly as a video editor, RetroArch/DOSBox, Mini NAS, Jellyfin media server, VM Manager, Frigate NVR, music streaming server (Navidrone), Immich server and local AI processing. It also runs the InfluxDB database and Grafana applications that Home Assistant uses.

The home lab network, also contains a Raspberry Pi 4 with the Sense HAT, which I am using as a test node for new hardware/software and also runs the ARR application stack (NordVP, QBittorremt, Prowlarr, Sonarr, etc.) software. Another planned Raspberry Pi4 on which I intend to install Android version 16 to test my moblie software applications, an ESP32 breakout development box, a Raspberry PI Zero/ESP32s that run the Weather Station. A Pi400 is used as a retro gaming console running the Retro Game OS and I also have a Xbox kicking around somewhere.

I have installed a 'Home Assistant Green' as my smart home hub. This includes, amongst other things, the main home dashboard, the Visual Studio add on so I can edit configuration files, Google calender add on, SSH Terminal add on, Uptime Kuma and Glances add ons for network monitoring, ESP32 Home add-on and the Mosquitto broker add-on which processes MQTT messages from the Weather Station and other IoT devices. The InfuxDB database collects time series data from Home Assistant. The Grafana application connects to the InfluxDB database allowing us to define nice looking dashboards. Grafana is also able to connect to other data sources. These two applications run on my Zima Board 2 server. An old Android tablet has been repurposed as a wall tablet using the Fully Koisk' application. I am also developing ESP32 addon modules that use the ESP Home HA intergration including using BLE beacons in each room so that HA can use my room location in automations.

I use Dashy as my main dashboard. My current hardware playground is a SMlight SMHub Nano on which I mainly run Zigbee2MQTT and MatterBridge. I also have the new Switchbot AI hub, which combines Frigate, Open Claw and Home Assistant in one hub and an ESP32 is running WireClaw.

An active intrest in IoT and electronics, has lead to building projects in the areas of smart homes, weather station, robotics and data collection mostly using the ESP32 and Raspberry Pi families with Python, Rust and Go. I am now tending to favour the ESP32 micro-controller and the ESP Home integration in Home Assistant over the Raspberry Pico family. I run KiCAD and the Arduino IDE on my Windows laptop and use PCBWay as my PCB manufactuer.

I also use Windows and .NET (C#) to develop applications including updating website config files, SignalR Hub, EHS Admin Control Panel (Blazor) which gives me system wide status information, Stripe for credit card processing, SendGrid for sending emails, EHS Android Test App (MAUI/Android) to provide a test rig to expirment with Android programming and an Azure Web Bot - GavBot the Third - to provide a FAQ and help system for my applications. I use Microsoft Azure for app services, storage blobs, queues, tables, function apps, logic apps, Cosmos DB, SQL DB, web bots, language cognitive services, SignalR and application insights for my applications. also involved in software projects for an object detection system using the OpenCV, Tensor Flow, PyTorch and Panda libraries.

I have also been using NodeJS (using the express framework) to develop a graphical chat system – ‘Chatter Box’ – at https://ehschatter-box.herokuapp.com/ that uses the HTML5 canvas control and includes features for automatic chat text language translation into 5 languages and interaction with MongoDB and Microsoft Azure storage blob data stores. I also written a couple of NodeJS modules - hosted on NPM – a message queue store and general-purpose utility modules and a test NuGet module.

I use the Obsidian application for all my note taking and Todoist to keep track of all my ToDo lists. Over the last few years, to deal with the increasing complexity of software development and deployment, I use Github for source control and Github Actions for CI/CD pipelines. I also have devloped a project management system writtem in PHP. I also write a hardware/software blog that is updated with what I have learnt in my travels. I have also done projects, using kickstarter products like the Sandwizz Bread Board and the Fipsy FPGA, see my project blog at https://www.endhousesoftware.com/projectblog/projectblog.htm for more details. I have retired my home developed ‘Job Control System’ that runs on Microsoft Access in favor of using GitHub Issues and Pull Requests.

I enjoy working in small teams and with good time keeping, communication and organization skills can work well under pressure to meet project deadlines. I can take the initiative and responsibility for parts of the project, enjoying learning new skills which can be latter shared with other team members maybe even taking on a mentoring role.

Email me at endhousesoftware999@gmail.com or visit my website at www.endhousesoftware.com