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Hands-on technology projects, practical guides and real-world experiments across homelabs, networking, automation, self-hosting, websites and custom web tools.
Everything here is built, tested and documented in a real environment — including the bits that didn’t work the first time.
Latest from the Lab
From Raspberry Pi Relays to an ESP32 MOSFET Model Lighting Controller
I started controlling model lighting with a Raspberry Pi GPIO and relay, switching a McLaren light set between 5 V and 3.3 V at sunset. Adding…
Explore project →Grafana Suddenly Slow? Tracing a Docker MAC Address Collision
Grafana dashboards became painfully slow even though CPU and RAM looked fine. The real cause was a duplicate Docker MAC address on a Synology-hosted bridge network…
Read the notes →Monitoring Proxmox LXC Containers Accurately with Prometheus and PVE Exporter
How I made the KITT Control Centre match Proxmox LXC CPU, RAM and disk figures by combining prometheus-pve-exporter with node_exporter, Prometheus and PromQL.
Explore project →More from Realm Labs
Recent builds, guides and experiments from across the lab.
Projects from the Lab
Things that started as an idea and somehow became actual working systems.
Secure Remote Access to a Homelab with WireGuard
As Realm Labs grew, remote access became increasingly useful. There are plenty of services inside the lab that I normally access only from the local network: management interfaces,…
Building KARR: A Local AI Assistant with Ollama, WebSockets, Memory and a Custom Web Interface
Most AI projects start with a chatbot. This one started with KARR. I wanted to build a local AI assistant inspired by the Knight Rider universe, but rather…
Building a Smarter Model Lighting Controller with ESP32 and MOSFETs
A practical RealmLabs project exploring how to replace a relay-based model lighting setup with an ESP32 and MOSFETs for cleaner wiring, independent channels, dimming, breathing effects and future…
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Realm Labs provides practical IT support, infrastructure, automation, website design and custom web tools for small businesses, home users and specialist projects.
A technology lab, project portfolio and growing knowledge base.
It’s where real systems are built, broken, repaired, upgraded and documented — partly to remember how they worked, and partly so somebody else doesn’t have to spend three hours discovering the same obscure fix.
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