Welcome back to Homelab Highlights. Today we’re talking about a fun new project: a stack light beacon that gives you a live status of your home lab. As the creator puts it, “I wanted a geeky and interesting way to check the overall status of my homelab,” and I think they nailed it.

At its heart is an ESP32 hooked up to a custom control board. Alerts from Prometheus Alertmanager are forwarded over MQTT to the beacon, and the system “supports a custom set of instructions per webhook, so you can fully define how the beacon should behave depending on what’s going on.” That means green for healthy, yellow for warnings, red for critical—and you can tweak every color, blink pattern, and duration.

You can check out the open-source control system at stackon.pavece.com, and for a deep dive on the hardware and software, head to the author’s blog post at blog.pavece.com/post/ive-installed-a-stack-beacon-in-my-homelab.

Quick specs on the lab: an HP ML350p Gen8 with 24 GiB RAM running Proxmox, an always-on Raspberry Pi 3B for PiHole and Uptime Kuma, and a repurposed Check Point T-1440 now running OPNsense.

That’s it for today’s one-minute spotlight—happy tinkering!
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