a1studmuffin

I cheated and just used a webscraper to pull the data from a local government website.

Here’s a screenshot of what my diagnostic interface for it looked like. The Python script took all the sensors as inputs and decided on a strategy for upstairs and downstairs, and gave the reason for its decision in a separate sensor for debugging purposes. The script performed all the necessary actions whenever it changed strategy.

I went down this rabbit hole a few years back. I’m in a house with 3 separate HVAC split systems over 2 floors, and we always had large temperature differentials and needed to constantly manage HVAC settings.

My goal was to never need to touch the settings for any of the HVAC units all year round, and I had plans to automate my windows so if it was nice outside, the house would ventilate automatically… but only if the pollen count was low, as I have allergies.

It became clear very early on that using the standard Home Assistant automation logic wasn’t going to be adequate for my needs, so I ended up running a Python script every half hour that reassessed the state of all sensors, using whatever crazy logic I dreamed up, then decided what actions to perform (if anything).

The general approach worked well, though I hit two snags and lost interest:

One was finding a (cheap) solution to physically open and close my roller windows. I came close, but didn’t want to make any permanent changes and had concerns about home insurance, so ultimately chickened out there. Everything still worked without this, but it would have been pretty cool to open windows automatically on a nice day for fresh air.

The other snag was more fundamental - I don’t think it’s possible to have a perfect temperature, even for one person. If I’m sitting still for long periods, I tend to want warmer temps. If I’m cleaning the house, I want cooler temps.

Ultimately my “ruleset” for the perfect solution became more and more complex, with edge cases and bugs popping up as the months rolled on, and it became clear I couldn’t represent this problem with a set of sensor inputs.

It was a fun experiment and I learned a lot, but I ended up going back to simpler automation rules after a while, like just turning on the heater in the morning if it’s cold, or vice versa. Solve the biggest problems first.

I think trying to automate to the extreme is sometimes a trap. Our hacker mindset wants the problem to be perfect and solveable, when in reality us humans are fickle creatures whose wants and whims change on the regular, and that can’t be captured easily in zeros and ones.

I guess as a starting point most of us in this thread don’t really know what university research teams do.

If they had a laptop or phone, what kinds of things would they want to do that requires a server? Will they need email? Instant messaging? File sharing? Document collaboration? Will there be sensitive information? Do they need specific software? Or put another way, without this server, what can’t they do?

If you can give some hints on that kind of stuff, I’m sure people in this thread can help out more with specifics on software/tech recommendations.

Edit: obviously Unreal Tournament is non-negotiable.

I think you really need to talk to the research team to find out what they want to use the server for, and how they want to collaborate. That will inform everything else.