phx

I've been looking at some Linux based phones and one thing that caught my eye was a Pi based build.

This makes a lot of sense to me in many ways as the smaller Pi's carry a lot of power and expandability, however it was based on an older 3b platform and consequently very bulky.

Currently, my searches online have led me mainly to boards that support CM4 but also have ethernet ports etc (adding build) or use USB/pinouts with no CM (Compute Module)connector.

Anyone know if there's a small board that can support cellular connectivity with a native CM connector?

Also, any way around the lack of SDCard support for Pi's that boot from eMMC (would like eMMC for the OS and SDCard for larger stuff, pictures etc)?

I'll add: the board doesn't have to be credit-card sized. Something along the lines of an average smartphone so I can fit a decent LCD would be fine, just no Ethernet etc making it too thick

My current system is running on an old 2U HP rackmount server with dual 16-core AMD Opteron-6262HE CPU's and two RAID-5 arrays (fast SSD array and slow 2.5" HDD array). There are generally 5-6 VMs running under a Linux master at a given time but none of them are using a whole lot of CPU cycles.

In general, it's noisy but fairly effective for my needs.

I'm looking at the future and what might be good replacement that offers a blend of power-efficiency, flexibility, and storage cost.

In particular, I'd like to:

• Ditch the 2.5" HDD array in favor of an efficient separate storage system, preferably an attached NAS with 3.5" disks on RAID5 but probably actually networked and not USB based (both for reliability and also so I can potentially provide storage directly to stuff running on separate SBC's etc). A storage system I could drop in now and still use after I upgrade the compute system would be great

• I'd like to keep the SATA-SSD array for stuff that needs faster disk, or possibly move up to a RAID'ed M2/NVMe.

• Move up to a more modern CPU that has a good Power-per-watt balance. 8-16 cores totally is probably good if that can be reasonably power efficient for idle cores etc, but dropping some VM's to run stuff on the aforementioned SBC's is also an option

• Still be rack-mounted for the main system, but not so freaking loud, and actually fit in a standard 24" deep rack

• Potentially be able to add a decent GPU or add-on board for processing AI models etc

Generally what it will be running is a bunch of VM's for stuff like NextCloud, remote-admin software, Media servers (Plex/Jellyfin), a Fileserver, some virtual desktops and various other fairly low-power VMs, BUT it'd be nice if I could add the dGPU or something with the horsepower for AI processing and periodic rendering/ripping/etc

I'm sorry debating on whether might make more sense to move all storage to BAD, then just replace the always-running stuff (NextCloud, Plex,Fileserver) with SBC's so that they're fairly easily swappable if something fails.

Has anyone seen anything in terms of locks that could be used for smaller doors etc. For example, a drawer/cabinet style lock or something that might work for bifold closet doors etc. Also setups that could be used to automatically slide out a drawer.

I'd like to create some "secret drawers" as well as be able to lock out stuff like the "candy/snack drawer" as certain members of my household have poor impulse control and like snitch candy then not easy their dinner

(Yes I've tried hiding it, putting it up high etc, but they're sneaky and automation is more fun)

While I quite like the ability to broadcast TTS, media, and other such things to Google Nest or Amazon Alexa devices, I'm trying to rein in my HASS setup so that it doesn't send data to our require cloud services.

Does anyone know of or recommend a wireless speaker service that can accept broadcast/streamed/sent audio without needing an internet connection. Bonus if it has a microphone that can integrate with something like a local Genie instance for accepting voice commands (without cloud processing)

I'm looking for a wall switch that I will take Tasmota firmware (so a ESP82XX chipset generally) but can get easily sourced and aren't a huge pain to reprogram.

I'm totally cool with soldering some serial jump points from the board of the appropriate Rx/Tx/GRND/3.3V and pin0 are readily available, but try to avoid stuff that requires soldering the chip itself.

I used to be able to get Globe etc dimmers from Costco that were flashable via the old OTA Tuya-Convert method, but that seems to be a thing of the past and I just need a regular ol' non-dimmer switch which is easy to find and access the required pins these days.

If there are switches which take 110VAC but don't output power, that's even better as some I'm just looking to supplement devices already have power but are inconvenient to access