Santos · Systems & Automation

I make homes
think for themselves.

Ten-plus years of night-shift warehouse operations by trade, systems engineer by compulsion — and the author of every rule his apartment obeys. By day I keep a building's worth of freight moving; after dark, the lights greet you at the door and the air purifier knows her bedtime.

What I do

Infrastructure

Proxmox clusters, LXC containers, Linux administration, nginx, Cloudflare — a datacenter that lives in a closet and never asks for attention.

Home Automation

OpenHAB rule engines, Zigbee mesh design, ESP32 firmware, presence detection — thirty-odd devices behaving like one quiet system.

Operations

n8n pipelines, watchdogs, and briefings. If something repeats, it becomes a script; if it matters, it becomes a dashboard.

Observability

Prometheus and Grafana watching watts, degrees, and link quality — because a hunch is no way to run a house.

Design & Fabrication

3D-printed brackets, enclosures, and parametric parts in OpenSCAD — hardware that fits because I wrote the math.

Selected work

  1. The Talking Apartment 2022–

    A home where doorways announce arrivals, beds gate the lights, and every device answers to rules I wrote myself — designed around one principle: automate the boring, protect the sacred (sleep).

  2. The Closet Datacenter 2023–

    Twelve containers hosting media, files, metrics and automation. Self-healing backups, one-command deploys, and uptime measured in seasons.

  3. Morning Briefing Engine 2024–

    Weather, power, and home state composed nightly and delivered at 6:15 — a newspaper written by the house, for the house.

Off the clock

Guitar

Started on classical, wandered into Travis picking, and settled where the feeling lives — blues. Clapton and Mayer taught me that restraint is a technique too.

The Outdoors

Exploring — trails, back roads, whatever's past the end of the map. The same instinct that runs the homelab: go see what's out there and figure out how it works.

Rotaries & JDM swaps

Wankel engines are a love language — I've pulled them, rebuilt wiring harnesses, and sorted the electronics that make them sing. Currently own a 2010 RX-8 R3 (the rare one); before that, a beloved '88 RX-7 convertible carrying a J-spec Turbo II swap. Nissan 240s too, engines ordered straight from Japan. If it's rare, rotary, or imported — I want a wrench on it.

Elsewhere

[email protected]

Best way to reach me — for work, questions, or homelab talk.

Built on open source

Everything here stands on community projects — OpenHAB, Zigbee2MQTT, Proxmox, and a hundred forum threads. I modify heavily, break things, and learn in public. The community showed me how; I just make it mine.