A dad, a teenager and a rack
My son and I are turning a cabinet full of cables into a proper home lab: a firewall, a Raspberry Pi cluster, a game server for his friends, and everything in between. One phase at a time, mistakes included, with an AI assistant helping all the way.
Our NAS has all the family's photos, home videos, music and films on it, and for years we just used it without ever really looking after it. Before building anything new on top of it, I went through it properly, then spent a few days fixing what I found: shutting it off from the internet, sorting out who can see what, setting up health checks and freeing up half the space.
Our old iPad can't be updated past iOS 12, so most apps won't install on it any more. Instead of letting it gather dust, we turned it into a family screen for the kitchen wall, served by the same 2012 Raspberry Pi that runs our Pi-hole.
The first thing we built cost nothing. A Raspberry Pi from 2012, which had been sitting in a drawer for years, now blocks adverts and trackers for the devices that matter most in the house.
It started with screens. My son is a teenager, and like most teenagers he can lose an evening to gaming or scrolling on his phone. I wanted to find something fun we could do together that would get him building rather than just consuming.