About This Blog and About Me Hello! My name is Joseph Morris. I am a autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, and socially anxious and a big nerd. My hobbies are making, general tinkering, 3D printing, home automation, and homelabbing. This is going to be a place for me to write about all of my various ideas, projects, thoughts, and whatever else I feel like.
Below is a summary of what I currently have, what unspeakable horrors I have thrust upon my poor machines, and what vile experiments I want to conduct next. If anyone wants my thoughts on any of these machines, I will probably do reviews at some point.
3D Printers
I currently have two 3D printers: a Prusa Core One and an Elegoo Neptune 4 Max.
The Prusa Core One has been modified with Prusa’s first-party Advanced Filtration mod and an MMU3. Other than that, it has some small plugs in various places to help seal the enclosure a little better. The future plans for this machine are the Core One+ upgrade, and definitely the Prusa/ Bondtech INDX when it comes out and when I can afford it.
I’ve done considerably more to the Elegoo Neptune 4 Max. It has an upgraded hotend (MicroSwiss FlowTech) and extruder (Bondtech LGX), and has KAMP, OctoEverywhere, and Screw_Tilt_Adjust configured. Going forward, I’d like to either replace this printer with something slightly smaller but higher quality, or upgrade to linear rails on at least the X and Y axes and switch the firmware to OpenNeptune. That said, I don’t use this machine nearly as much as the Prusa, so we’ll see if that actually happens.
Home Lab
I’m at the beginning of my homelab journey. I currently have a HexOS/TrueNAS box. Running on it are: Kubernetes-managed apps including Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, Tailscale, Immich, and Pi-Hole; and Dockge managing Docker containers for Tailscaled and Manyfold. I also have a Windows VM, which I use as a centralised system for managing slicing files for 3D printing. Beyond that, I have two storage pools — one SSD-based for everyday use, and one HDD-based for storing large amounts of data and backups. Hardware-wise, it’s running an AMD Ryzen 5700G, an AMD Radeon Pro WX 3200 GPU (for the VM), 32GB of RAM, 4 SSDs, and 2 hard drives.
Next on the server roadmap is adding more hard drives when prices come down, and getting a media server sorted — likely Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin.
Home Automation
I’m also at the beginning of my home automation journey. I currently have a Home Assistant Green, one motion sensor (an Everything Presence Lite with a CO2 sensor), a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, some smart bulbs from various brands, some Meross smart plugs and surge protectors (basically power strips, but Meross doesn’t sell multi-socket extensions without surge protection), and a Sonoff smart Thermostatic Radiator Valve (TRV).
The immediate goal for my smart home is getting everything working properly. A well-functioning smart home should require basically no interaction from the user under normal conditions — it should do what you’d want, when you’d want it, with manual interaction reserved for unusual circumstances. My current goal is to get this working well in two rooms, which will likely require picking up some additional sensors such as door/window sensors and extra motion sensors.