Home Lab Thread

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I have several DIY desks as workstations. One for soldering, Hakko FM206, also a Chinese ultrasonic cleaner and a Dremel(r) setup. The other desk has one of those cutting mats and drawers for various cutting tools. Main desk has my PC, next to it is where I keep all the tools sorted.

Cabinet for dangerous liquids, various boxes to dump metal crap and salvaged parts etc, those could always become handy.

Main isolated section for experiments and prototyping features various specific stuff for my research and work. Going further could lead to a dox so that's it.

Looking to add a 3D printer and maybe even a CNC mill, they are getting very cheap nowadays. Sick of having to borrow one. Ones at my workplace are as reliable as noble peace prizes.

My bedroom is a dump but the lab is kept organised and clean, that's how autistic I am.
 
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- I have a windows 10 desktop PC I built on the cheap that I use to download shit from Usenet. It has a bunch of 1 tb hard drives I bought for $20 each in it. There's a raspberry pi 3 hook up to my TV with LibELEC, I just use a plain old SMB share to access the media on the Windows PC. It's worked really well for a really long time, so I don't fuck with it too much.

-I have Pi Zero W running Pihole.

-I have another Pi 3 running a jabber server that only my wife and I have accounts on. I sometimes put random stuff I want to fuck with on here. For example, I ran a Telnet BBS on it for a year or so me and a couple of friends could try out LORD.

-A old miniature desktop running an OpenVPN server in Linux Mint.

- A windows 98 PC I found outside on the ground and fixed up running a Quake 2 server.

- A hoard of old PCI and PCI express cards, motherboards, hard drives, old laptops, PSUs etc. I pick up a lot of it around town on bulk garbage day. A lot of people just toss their old PCs on the curb, because the setup itself is old and slow, but they'll have perfectly usable PSUs and hard drives and stuff inside.

I have a wife and kids, so my autist bullshit in confined to a single room in the basement. The room looks like a fucking space station cockpit.
 
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In addition to the network junk I've got going on over in the Ubiquiti thread, I've got the following:
A dual E5-2630 v2 ESXi server for my server needs, mostly built off stuff that fell off the back of a truck in my bay area days. This probably needs rebuilt but runs the following:
  • general Linux server crap
  • Home Assistant
  • MythTV
  • Occasionally an IDS, which I always think is a great idea until I get all the false positives from my intentional illicit internet activity.
  • Zoneminder to run the cameras (can't be too careful since they're building section 8 down the street)
An E3 box for FreeNAS with a fairly nice array setup at this point.
A LeoNTP time server because good timing is one of the few things I'm fairly 'tistic about.
Single-purpose RPi-oids everywhere doing little things like ADS-B decode
A KiwiSDR for HF funsies.

All this goes in near a basic but functional bench with RF/electronic test gear that I don't use enough. Really if you don't have a little virtualization box, you should make one. The ability to just spin things up to try and nuke if it goes wrong is so handy.
 
I have a knock-off chinese pi but it's not running at the moment. Pihole seems kind of pointless, as it doesn't deal with video ads which are the ones that annoy me the most. I should probably get it back up as a fileserver, and was trying to run my own little Travis CI-inspired testing service, but don't have a project running that would benefit from that.

Stoneheart said:
I have an Eppendorf Zentrifuge i use to spin stuff with.
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That's really cool. What do you use it for? You make me want to get a little lab setup, but I don't see many uses outside of a full-blown molbio lab.
 
Slaundromat said:
That's really cool. What do you use it for? You make me want to get a little lab setup, but I don't see many uses outside of a full-blown molbio lab.
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I just spin stuff with it. i got it very very cheap and the plan at some point was to build a small lab. but that was before i came to the conclusion that i DONT NEED a lab. why should i do DNA tests and stuff like that?
 
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