Are you ready for another set of weekend homelab project ideas? This weekend, I'm showing you a few things that I wish I had done sooner in my homelab, including setting up a Wi-Fi heatmap, building a drive health dashboard, and spinning up an uptime monitor.
Wi-Fi heatmap visualizer
Map the signal strength throughout your house for better access point placement
Do you have spots in your home where the Wi-Fi isn't the best? I know I do, and I have multiple access points in my house. However, access point placement is extremely important when it comes to proper Wi-Fi signal throughout the house, and that's where a Wi-Fi heatmap visualization comes in.
There are a number of ways to create a Wi-Fi heatmap visualizer. For starters, those with a UniFi system can simply use the WiFiman app on a smartphone. This is what I plan to do soon when I do a network audit here at the house, since I run UniFi .
With WiFiman, you simply walk throughout the house with the app open, and it will monitor signal, throughput, latency, and roaming. On phones with LiDAR (like modern iPhones), you can additionally make a floor plan of your house within the app itself so it can better understand the layout and make setup recommendations.
Another option would be to use NetSpot , which works with any Wi-Fi network. Simply install NetSpot on a singular device, be that a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, and then upload your home's floor plan to the NetSpot app.
Once it's ready to go with a proper floor plan, you simply walk around the house with NetSpot open on your device and then tap whatever location you're standing in on the floor plan. This will then allow NetSpot to query your Wi-Fi signal strength and use that information to build a heatmap of the Wi-Fi coverage in your home.
Lastly, you could simply use a tool like WiFi Heatmap , which is a browser-based Wi-Fi planning tool. You can draw (or upload) your home's floor plan, and then begin placing Wi-Fi access points throughout the house for it to visualize what the coverage should look like. UniFi users can also use the UniFi Design platform to do the same if they want to plan an installation before actually installing.
Either way, you should definitely make a Wi-Fi heatmap of your home if the wireless performance isn't where you want it to be. It's the best way to find dead spots and solve your access point placement once and for all.
Build a drive health dashboard
Know your HDD and SSD health and be proactive before a drive fails
Scrutiny
S.M.A.R.T., or Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, is a standard nearly as the modern home computer is a well-known way of monitoring your storage drives to see when they're going to fail, or if they're currently failing.
The problem with S.M.A.R.T. though, is it's often incredibly hard to read or understand. The technical jargon in the S.M.A.R.T. tests can sometimes be a bit wonky. For instance, I have a refurbished enterprise hard drive in my server, and it has a lot of "warning flags" from S.M.A.R.T.
Since it's an old drive, but it has been refurbished, I'm not nearly as worried about many of those "warning flags" though. Instead, using something like Scrutiny in a Docker container is one of the best ways to easily see what's going on with your drives.
Scrutiny takes the S.M.A.R.T. data and makes it human-readable, giving you actionable information on the drives in your system. Not only does Scrutiny show you the data in an easier-to-digest way, but it also gives explanations for each data point so you know what it actually means.
So, before your hard drives start failing on you, spin up Scrutiny so you're aware of what's going on before it happens.
Self-hosted uptime monitor for your self-hosted services
Keep an eye on your self-hosted services and know when they go down
@StephanStS / DietPi
Your homelab's uptime can be a key factor in just how useful it is. If you have services that are constantly going down, then there's a good chance you might need to fix something or tweak a setting.
That's where an uptime monitor comes in. I use Uptime-Kuma for my uptime monitoring, and it's a fantastic tool. One thing about hosting an uptime monitor in your own homelab is that the uptime monitor is only running when your homelab is.
Realistically, the best place to run an uptime monitor is outside your home network on a VPS with Tailscale linking it back into the local network. However, you definitely can run it on local hardware, as I've done many times.
Once you have Uptime-Kuma set up, you can configure notifications to let you know if a self-hosted service goes down, and how long it stays down. I normally utilize Discord or Telegram for notifications with Uptime-Kuma, though there are many other services that you can use for notifications.
However you slice it, Uptime-Kuma will become a crucial part of your homelab stack. Sometimes all you need is a simple ping to let you know that a service is offline, so you can restart it.
Your homelab doesn't have to be complicated
When I first started homelabbing several years ago, I thought that all homelabs (and all homelab projects) had to be complicated. I was very wrong.
Sometimes, a homelab project can be complex, sure. But, there are many homelab projects that are quite simple—like Uptime-Kuma. Don't let complexity stop you, just start your homelab and have fun with it.
