The home lab I use as a permanent test bench — and as the place where anything I want to actually keep running, runs.
The router
An OpenWrt build serving as the network's edge, configured well past the defaults:
- VLAN segmentation separating trusted devices, IoT devices, and guests
- Firewall rules that keep IoT gear off the trusted network entirely
- DNS-level filtering and local DNS for the lab's own services
- WireGuard for remote access without exposing anything to the open internet
I'm currently evaluating a NanoPi R5S (RK3568) as the next hardware generation for this role.
Storage
A NAS holding project archives, board images, and backups, with scheduled snapshots. It's also the artifact store for firmware builds — being able to go back to the exact image that was on a board six months ago has saved me more than once.
Edge AI
An NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano running inference workloads locally: vision models for camera streams, and a place to test what does and doesn't fit inside an edge power budget before it goes anywhere near a product.
Why bother
Every piece of this doubles as a rehearsal for problems that show up in real embedded products — network isolation, secure remote access, reproducible images, and inference inside a thermal envelope.