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I Made a Robot and It's Brain

·2 mins
Technology Selfhosted
Table of Contents

I Made a Robot and It’s Brain #

Did you think that’s a line from a western? Haha kidding, it’s for real.

The Project #

Ghostrunner, my latest sideproject, is a workshops tool that helps you configure hardware setup, software installation, and infrastructure provisioning using a single YAML file. The idea? Your infrastructure as code.

The Brain #

The “brain” behind the server - an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X cutting-edge processing powerhouse. RAM: 128GB DDR4. And the OS - Arch Linux, of course.

Why I Built It #

Frustration with setup and configuration complexity, tweaking, and troubleshooting. Ghostrunner automates much of this voodoo.

What’s in the Brain #

My Raspberry Pi 4 Model B + 8GB RAM for the headless server, running Raspberry Pi OS.

How Long Did It Take #

4 weeks of coding + testing. Plus 2 days assembly, and 5 days troubleshooting. Hardware assembly could go either way - depends on your level.

Can I Build It? #

For node-based things, yeah, in under a week.

What Did I Learn #

That you can laptop-mod hackers use Arch for infrastructure. So hardware, software, & OS altogether. The big twist here? It’s not for the faint of heart.

Troubleshooting #

Spent a morning trying to rev the processor over 3.8 GHz. Set power limits, updated BIOS, and the Like. Made me a fan of B1 That’ll teach me to check the compatibility with different software.

Pricing vs Alternatives #

Ghostrunner is a single-time setup. Free if you host it yourself. Else, it costs $xx. Compare to Spinach. Plus it compiles code right in your browser

Step-by-step guideedo #

Install Ansible using pip install ansible``ansible-galaxy collections install -n ansible.net.poolRun the following Ansible playbooksansible-playbook provision.yml --ask-vault-passEnter Vault password when prompted and follow the instructions. Recursively replacing: # Generate keys for provisioning and SSHaccesskey_leader

Install Docker #

Follow the Docker installation guide.

Create a Volume #

docker volume create myapp-data

Set Owner #

docker run -d -itv --rm --name myapp/myblog --volumes-from myapp-data goodsoftware/blog:latest /bin/sh -c "
  cd /app && owner -h . && useradd -u app user/app; dnf install git epyc;
"

Summary #

Building Ghostrunner is straightforward with a bit of Linux know-how. It automates server configuration, saves time, and gives you the ability to version control infrastructure. Not perfect, but worth it for the time saved in infrastructure management.