The Lab · Services

Services

Home Assistant on the Pi and Plex on the tower, with a handful of smaller services tying them together.

Two boxes split two ways. tars runs the smart-home control plane: Home Assistant with HACS, Zigbee2MQTT against the SLZB-MR1 coordinator, MQTT as the bus between them, AdGuard Home for DHCP and DNS, and the Omada Controller for the ER605. wednesday runs Plex as the centerpiece, with a handful of other Docker containers around it. Everything is in a container, which is the boring choice and very much the right one for a setup I would rather not be debugging from a phone at the airport.

Services · 6 items

Smart-home controller (tars)Home Assistant: HACS for custom components (Tuya Local, Chime TTS, HACS itself). Frontend dressed in card-mod with the Frosted Glass theme and the Navbar card.
Zigbee bridge (tars)Zigbee2MQTT: Against the SLZB-MR1 coordinator, talks to HA over MQTT.
Message broker (tars)MQTT: The bus Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant share. No web UI, by design.
DNS + DHCP (tars)AdGuard Home: Network-wide DNS filtering plus DHCP for the home LAN.
Network management (tars)Omada Controller: TP-Link's controller, here just to manage the ER605.
Media server (wednesday)Plex: The library that the TV, the phones and the Apple TV all pull from.

Last updated · April 28, 2026