About Farlake Lab

The lab where things break first, so yours don't

have to.

By day, I design systems that are supposed to not fail. Pressure sensors, PLCs, feedback loops — the kind of infrastructure where an unhandled edge case costs real big money and occasionally triggers a very awkward phone call. From the lawyer of the deceased victims.

By night, I go home and break things on purpose.

Welcome to Farlake Lab.

This is where I document what I tried, what exploded, what I Googled — well, actually AI'd — at 11pm, and occasionally what actually worked.

I'm a process control engineer with a compulsive need to spin up one more service, flash one more firmware, and convince myself that this time I'll do proper cable management.

I haven't.

Things I have done:

• Locked myself out of my own server — the one that took me weeks to configure.
• Left my printer running overnight. Woke up to 8 hours of noise, 0 hours of adhesion, and one full spool of filament transformed into a technicolor tumbleweed.
• Released magic smoke from a brand-new microcontroller. Around midnight. Obviously.
• Built a home automation system that automated locking me out.
• Convinced myself I needed a Kubernetes cluster for two Docker containers.
• Tried to run a heavy-duty conveyor belt with a drone motor. It looked big in the picture.

The irony is not lost on me that someone who designs reliable control systems spends his evenings in a state of controlled chaos. But that's exactly the point.

In a professional setting, you design around failure. In a homelab, you learn from it — hands-on, at your own expense, with no downtime SLA and only yourself to call at 2am.

Everything I write here is a trail through territory I already got lost in. The path is marked. The pitfalls are labelled. The coffee is implied.

What you'll find here

Real project logs — from the initial "how hard can it be" to the final "okay it works, don't touch it."

3D printing, servers, Raspberry Pis, microcontrollers, AI experiments, self-hosted tools, and whatever else lands on my desk.

No paid promotions. No affiliate links. No "10 tips to supercharge your workflow." Just technical honesty and the occasional sigh.

Why "Farlake Lab"?

That's classified.