The lab runs a small, always-on Mac mini that does real work: it watches the weather, keeps an eye on itself, and pushes alerts to my phone — all with free, open APIs and a few hundred lines of plain scripts. Here's the whole system on one page.
The whole thing follows one idea: a small home server can run real, reliable automation without a cloud bill or a rack of gear. Each piece does one job.
Polls the free National Weather Service API every few minutes. Severe storm and tornado warnings trigger an immediate alert; hail warnings get a "move the vehicle" heads-up.
A push notification for everyday alerts, plus a carrier-registered SMS path for the loud, can't-miss ones — so a warning reaches a phone even with the app closed.
The server can't report its own outage, so it "checks in" with an outside service every 5 minutes. If the check-ins stop, that service raises the alarm. The absence of a heartbeat is the alert.
A zero-dependency web dashboard shows live status, current alerts, a radar map, and settings — served on the home network only, no ports opened to the internet.
It even watches its own running costs — a daily check warns if the SMS balance is getting low, so alerts never quietly stop working.
Plain Python and shell scripts, scheduled by the OS. Nothing exotic, nothing to babysit — the kind of build you can read end-to-end in an afternoon.
Build logs and walkthroughs for projects like this go up on YouTube — @KyleTechCorner.