Recently I was greatly frustated by the fact I couldn't remotely power up or shut down my RaidSonic Icy Box storage box. These consumer-level boxes are basically local control only, no WOL or any remote functionality.

I decided to change the situation. As a half-day project, I made a simple Raspberry Pi + relay control to add remote network-accessible control for my Icy Box IB-3640SU3. There are also security and privacy aspects involved that might interest you.

Home automation is a large field with many market products available. TinyForest is another home automation system, developed and designed from scratch for various target environments, written in Python 3 and ReactJS. In time writing this article, TinyForest core system is fully functional, and further improvements are planned. It adapts to multi-sensor and multi-device configurations, and can handle everything from irrigration and heating to light controls.

Do you want to gather data from multiple Android devices remotely at the same time or control the devices? Absolutely possible. Although digital markets have solutions already, I wanted to do the task bit differently with common server management tools: SaltStack.

It turned out to be possible: Android devices can successfully be controlled with SaltStack.

Have you ever wanted to take a cup of coffee while installing Windows Active Directory?

I recently had one this kind of task which is why I decided to give control for semi-automated PowerShell modules & scripts, written from scratch. System administrator should supply parameters for the installation process to use. Otherwise, deployment of the whole AD: fully automated.