Home Assistant’s voice stack splits into wake word, speech-to-text and intent handling. RK3588 has the headroom to keep all three local. Three local stages microWakeWord for wake: enabled directly as an add-on with low CPU cost; Whisper for STT: the small model transcribes a sentence in 1-2 s on RK3588; Chinese accuracy is acceptable; Piper […]
Immich is the closest self-hosted match to Google Photos, but it is hungrier than Jellyfin. It runs fine on RK3588 — as long as you understand its resource curve. Do the resource math first Initial indexing is the heavy part: clustering faces across tens of thousands of photos can take hours. Run it on the […]
The value of a data gateway is one box talking to every PLC on site, which demands broad protocol coverage and tag-list configuration. Multi-protocol is the bulk of the work Protocol coverage: S7, MC, FINS and Modbus TCP are the big four — build a compatibility matrix and test unit by unit; Tag lists: import […]
The client required that nothing in the rooms stop working when the WAN drops, which pushed the architecture from cloud to local edge. Local-first was non-negotiable Architecture: one edge host per floor running Home Assistant, room devices on Zigbee and Bluetooth, with the gateway only for remote access and configuration; Network: guest Wi-Fi separated from […]
Cleartext DNS exposes every domain you visit and can be hijacked. Encrypted upstreams fix both at once. Why encrypt DNS AdGuard Home speaks DoH/DoT: paste upstream URLs; latency usually grows under 5 ms; Split routing: low-latency upstream for local domains, encrypted general upstream for the rest; Enforce it: point DHCP at the RK3588 and block […]
Whisper is entirely usable on RK3588, but offline batch and streaming have very different expectations. Batch works; realtime takes conditions Offline batch: the small model transcribes one hour of audio in 15-25 minutes; faster-whisper INT8 goes faster still; Streaming: needs VAD segmentation plus chunked inference with 3-8 s latency — fine for subtitles, not interpretation; […]
Sequential writes (recordings) and random I/O (databases) want opposite settings, so one configuration will always hurt one of them. Identify the workload first Scheduler: none for NVMe, mq-deadline for SATA SSDs, bfq for spinning disks to preserve interactivity; Read-ahead: raise read_ahead_kb (say 2048) for sequential work, lower it (say 256) for random work to avoid […]
Copying the config directory carries most settings but loses USB device bindings and some integration secrets. A verifiable migration follows steps. Backup is more than copying a folder Use HA’s built-in backup: a full backup includes config, database and addon snapshots; Move the Zigbee network: take Z2M’s coordinator_backup.json and devices.json together, and devices rejoin without […]
Self-hosting music differs from video: huge libraries, small files, and little need for transcoding. On RK3588, Navidrome’s footprint is almost unmeasurable. Why Navidrome Very low overhead: a 100k-track library sits around 200 MB of RAM — effectively invisible on RK3588; Subsonic-compatible: play:Sub on iOS and Symfonium/DSub on Android connect directly, with offline caching and car […]
CNC panels live with oil mist, vibration and wide temperature swings. Industrial-grade parts and a fanless design are the first principles. Three trials beside the machine Temperature and cooling: -20 to 70C industrial parts in a fanless aluminum enclosure that conducts heat to the case; Vibration-proof storage: eMMC or industrial SSD — spinning disks die […]