guess I need to look at bit for “how to stuff a huge graphics card into a mini box”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2Y62JGDCo

(That’s only the latest in a whole series of videos of his on that topic.)

Admittedly I haven’t used Omada even though my gear supported it (before I flashed OpenWRT on it), but I don’t think it bears any resemblance to Ansible except in the most basic sense of being able to accomplish administrative tasks somehow.

What I was expecting was something that would provide a web dashboard showing all of my OpenWRT (and ideally, misc. other devices) at once, maybe with a nice diagram of the network topology and stuff like that.

Does there exist something more appropriate?

EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck

If they’re software features and OpenWRT doesn’t implement them, yes. That’s not really the fault of the hardware manufacturer, though; that’s just a tradeoff you’ve chosen to make.

For example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to use Ubiquiti’s UniFi or TP-Link’s Omada software-defined networking to manage your OpenWRT-flashed device, but that’s just because OpenWRT hasn’t implemented it, not because installing it trips some kind of DRM fuse or whatever.

(I think OpenWISP might be the OpenWRT-compatible Free Software equivalent for that sort of thing, but I have yet to look into it myself so I’m not sure.)

Otherwise, I haven’t personally heard of any vendors intentionally sabotaging their hardware such that it disables itself when flashed with OpenWRT, but that’s not the same as an affirmative statement that it can’t ever happen.

Everything’s an outdoor activity if you’re exhibitionist enough! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Edit: oh wait, you meant genealogy research.

I have a domain, but all I use it for so far is email (with an email provider, not my own mail server, hosted locally or otherwise). I’d still call that “usable,” though.

Creating more mainstream use-cases is how you get people to donate more bandwidth.

Furthermore, how do you go about running cables in your home?

You watch some Youtube videos about how to do it and then you follow the instructions.

It’s going to depend a lot on the construction details of your house:

• Do you have wooden framing (common in the US), masonry (common in Europe, as I understand it), or something else?
• Do you have access to an attic or basement/crawlspace?
• Do you need to run wires on exterior walls (which means dealing with insulation), or just interior ones?

For me (wooden frame construction, accessible attic and basement), I didn’t find it to be too difficult. Is it work? Yeah, of course. But it’s not that bad, and I recommend spending the effort because having proper wall plates wtih in-wall wires is way nicer than having stuff snaking along surfaces.

LOL, it lights up when the character jumps.

I don’t like the guy’s breathless over-enthusiasm, but NetworkChuck has a video on how to integrate LLM-based voice assistants with HomeAssistant using Whisper and Ollama.

I typically sort by “top six hours” and I’m barely aware of the problem OP is talking about. So yeah, it seems like downvoting works.

Sounds to me like the other effective remedy for you would be changing instances. Downvotes exist for a good reason and disabling them is harmful.