I’ve been using Cosmos for almost a year now, huge fan of it. Makes things super simple for a newbie, but you can still take a peek at how things are working under the hood to build docker management and reverse proxy skills

Jfc that Arduino terms update is disgusting

I think your project has admirable goals, but things like Cosmos Cloud and Casa OS already aim to address this. I think it would be useful for you to show what value proposition yours brings versus their apps, e.g. which parts of selfhosting you think your app handles better. I also agree with @flatfire@lemmy.ca in that much more documentation is needed so the user can educate themselves how the back end works.

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In terms of the tinyminimicro’s I think i5-6500T 7500T or 8500T (T signifies 35w TDP) could all fit your price point depending on RAM/SSD specs. I haven’t done much research on the n100 processors but I think they are broadly comparable to the above i5’s

While I get leaning towards AMD products, I’ve been doing so as well, when I built my first server with a Ryzen 5 2400GE I have found that there just isn’t as much resources/support for enabling transcoding with the vega 11 in Jellyfin or Immich. Most Intel iGPU’s have a hardware chip specifically tuned for transcoding called quicksync that you should strongly consider.

Especially in the $100-200 price range tiny mini micro’s from HP/Lenovo/Dell are widely available and offer lots of capability in a power-efficient (~10-15w idle, 40-50w full load) and easily maintainable form factor. The Lenovo’s in particular are interesting due to a few models having full pci-e slots if you decide later you want a GPU.
Lenovo pci-e

Finally for software I would suggest looking into Cosmos Cloud, I use it and have found it made it so much easier to setup and manage all my docker containers and domain name/reverse proxy settings.

Any Intel CPU with quicksync will likely be plenty transcoding capability for his use case with significantly lower power draw

Like you ended up doing a PiHole at home? I’m surprised there’s no access control. I was on the verge of setting that or Adguard home up for myself but realized using Adguard’s public servers is effectively the same thing, just without the extra privacy of hosting at home.

I’ve run the duckduckgo version of this for years but only recently found out you can get most of this functionality natively in android (android 13 for me) by setting a private DNS as shown in the below image. My duckduckgo app tracking protection does still catch attempts but it’s basically just google now, instead of dozens of companies before.

I’m surprised you’re getting disappointing results with Qwen 3 Coder 480b. I run Qwen 2.5 coder 14b locally (Open WebUI + Ollama) on my 3060 12gb and I’ve been pretty pleased with it’s answers so far relating to python code, Django documentation/settings, and quirks with my reverse proxy.

I assume you aren’t hosting the 480b locally right? Are you using Open WebUI and an Open API key?

I’m actually right there with you, I have a 3060 12gb and tbh I think it’s the absolute most cost effective GPU option for home use right now. You can run 14B models at a very reasonable pace.
Doubling or tripling the cost and power draw just to get 16-24gb doesn’t seem worth it to me. If you really want an AI-optimized box I think something with the new Ryzen Max chips would be the way to go - like an ASUS ROG Z-Flow, Framework Desktop or the GMKtek option whatever it’s called. Apple’s new Mac Minis are also great options. Both Ryzen Max and Apple make use of shared CPU/GPU memory so you can go up 96GB+ at much much lower power draws.

I haven’t used any but have researched it some:
Minisforum DEG1 looks like the most polished option, but you’d have to add an m.2 to oculink adapter and cable.
ADT-Link makes a wide variety of kits as well with varying pcie gen and varying included equipment.

Homebox has this capability too, you can generate QR codes for assets and scan it later to identify whatever’s inside.

I think it becomes more useful as you accumulate stuff - I get frustrated when my wife buys crap on Amazon that we already have. So while I don’t have the time or energy to sort everything in our house, I am beginning to catalogue things as we buy or find them in the hope it becomes more useful over time to find things we rarely use and/or avoid re-buying excess items

https://a.co/d/hh2N98y Something as simple as that, though I’m not sure 5v/3a is enough for a pi5 you’d have to check power specs

I would especially advise against relying on battery banks due to the heat, if you’re just going to use it in the car and already going to the trouble of customizing so much hardware I’d find a way to run a power supply off a switched 12v fuse or wire from the car - just convert to 5v/USB power. I’m sure there are generic kits online

My first time I started winging it with a raspberry pi, docker, and nginx and it took me like 2 months to get one service up and running and I didn’t feel it was very secure - fail2ban didn’t work, geoblocking didn’t work, and updates were manual.

When I re-started from scratch with an x86 device and cosmos it has been shockingly easy in comparison. Not only is it much quicker to spool the service up (app store), they can be automatically updated, the proxy has options for geoblocking, rate limiting, etc.

I’ve even got some of the services below built from a custom compose file instead of the app store, some use remote storage and some are set up with OAuth SSO. There’s still mild troubleshooting for a lot of things but it’s been much easier for me to understand and fix issues, plus there’s an active discord community as well.

I’m all in on Cosmos Cloud, been very happy with it

I only have my one anecdote to go off of, but if you are located in the US eBay is full of enterprise computer reseller postings and mine arrived in very clean condition. And eBay generally has pretty strong buyer protections.

The beginning of your post sounds like you are still looking at hardware to buy, but the later half seems like you already have the NUC?

If not I’d suggest looking at a used HP Mini, Lenovo Tiny, or Dell Micro ex-enterprise PC. They can be had very cheap off ebay, run with similarly low power demands but very capable devices. I run an HP 705 G4 mini Ryzen 5 2600GE with 16gb ram, 256gb SSD, cost me about $95 and averages about 15w