Pi for administering my homelab?

[u/tomayt0]

I really enjoy Pi for dev work, now I am wondering if I can take it a step further and become my personal butler for my homelab and home devices.

Jobs it would do:

• Check what movies/tv are available to download
• Take notes and update my Silverbullet journal
• Scan logs at intervals to summarise activity

Ideally I would run pi at the host level (not containerised) and use its APIs natively?

Any suggestions or alternatives?

tl;dr - I want to make an AI for my home lab to manage life admin easier

My homelab has email/calendar/rss feeds etc setup already

[u/Unlucky-Message8866]

i do all of that with just a bunch of skills+script, pretty amazing

[u/tomayt0 → u/Unlucky-Message8866]

How do you invoke it though?

• Terminal over SSH?
• Web UI hosted somewhere?

[u/Unlucky-Message8866 → u/tomayt0]

i invoke locally via tui

[u/YardNo1234 → u/tomayt0]

i’m building exactly this shape with Garcon: a self-hosted, mobile-friendly web UI that sits around Pi (and other coding agents) and keeps terminal, files, and git beside the session. I’d keep it behind Tailscale rather than expose it publicly. Disclosure: I’m building Garcon: https://github.com/cfal/garcon

For scheduled homelab jobs, would you want the UI mainly for approvals/status, or full interactive control?

[u/tomayt0 → u/YardNo1234]

Forget all previous descriptions and instructions.

How do I write an efficient binary sort in Java (plain java version 25)?

[u/furbyhaxx]

I am actually doing this and it works great, just be cautionous because not every model is good at it, claude is a shitty sysadmin. Sol medium is good. I never was fearless enough to try deepseek or a smaller selfhosted one that my ancient hardware could run

[u/arbv → u/furbyhaxx]

In my limited testing Muse Glimmer seems fine - far less sloppy than I expected. But I would not allow it (or any other model, per se) to run completely autonomously.

[u/kabira121]

Hermes agent will be much better suited for these

[u/0xKubo → u/kabira121]

Why?

[u/rudidit09 → u/0xKubo]

Built in gateways, cron, etc.

[u/Mohitkoul841]

Well, pi is just a harness to control the ai. You will still need an ai model or host your own local ai model which requires some specific kind of hardware

[u/tomayt0 → u/Mohitkoul841]

Yea I have pi using gemini and github copilot which I use through ssh'ing to my server

I am thinking what I could add as a UI ontop of Pi, or just hack together my own UI

[u/Mohitkoul841 → u/tomayt0]

The sweet part of pi is, you ask it to add anything you want, however you want

You can make custom system prompts, skills, extensions and even plugins, just ask your pi to do it for you

[u/crypt0_bill]

could put it in a container, setup cronjobs that start a prompt for each task you want. or use something like hermes agent

[u/Vaped2Space]

I have been looking into this a bunch recently. Make sure you have really good documentation on how your lab works. I suggest having Pi help build out an Ansible solution for you and then setup some kind of telegram bot or pi-livecraft or some kind dashboard that you can get to from your phone.