Homelab Idea · KubeCraft (Free)

Homelab Idea

I’ve been planning out what I want to build in my homelab, and the possibilities are… endless. Exciting and mildly overwhelming at the same time.

Here’s where I finally landed:

I’m using a Lenovo ThinkPad L13 Yoga (i3-10110U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) running Ubuntu as the base for a K3s cluster. Not exactly a data center powerhouse, but perfect for learning Kubernetes fundamentals without smoking my electric bill.

The Project Goal

I’ve got a Google Nest (Gen 3) thermostat, and I want to pull real-world energy data out of it to analyze:

- How often the furnace or AC runs

- Average indoor temps

- Seasonal patterns

- Whether this thing is actually saving me money or just looks fancy

Like I said, the laptop will be the cluster running multiple pods, and I plan to visualize everything in Grafana. I’ll figure out the guts in between.

I learn best by doing — and doing something that actually interests me. IMO, this beats wandering through a course without a purpose.

The Plan

- FastAPI microservice to fetch & normalize Nest data

- Store data in Postgres

- Deploy everything in K3s (Deployments, Services, Ingress)

- Visualize with Grafana

- (Eventually) automate deployments via GitHub Actions → K3s

Thoughts?

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