I’m running a biofurification m.2. card that was $30 and it’s amazing, might want to try it if your motherboard supports it. Bifurcation is the ability for the motherboard to split individual pci-e lanes into multiple groups that can be used by many devices at once. The cost of m.2. pci-e cards plummets if it relies on the motherboard for that.
It’s from a company called Konyead, it’s their 4 slot m.2. ssd to pcie 4.0 x16 adaptor.
Most painful? Guess that depends on your insistence on making it good.
Most painful for me was definitely running shielded cat 6a through my whole house and my ceilings don’t have strapping so getting my ceiling mounted ap’s installed and my AI pickup mics was a nightmare. I ended up cutting a 12 hole in one wall and having to use a 50" drill extension to drill into a floor joist cavity and then carefully and painfully fushing my endoscope through wiring holes for lights etc pulling it around with giant magnets. Took me 3 days to get the one in the kitchen…
But I mapped every pipe, and every wire so thats good.
I ran 6 runs to my office alone because I wanted 6 sets of poe++ lines in my office so I could play with poe circuits on my electronics bench.
Also for the servers I had to install 2 new breakers and run two sets of romex for two 25 anp circuits. And I wall mounted that rack, so that sucked too.
However while my servers are in the garage, my router, fiber modem ,switches etc are under the living room stairs. I wasnt about to run 25+ ethernet lines out to the garage so the garage only has 4.
I rain All my upstairs ethernet out of the attic into the same cavity straight down the side wall of the stairs directly behind our entertainment center and into the under stairs soace behind it. Then into the crawl space for the downstairs stuff and garage.
Wiring stuff, definitely the pain point.
I went with ubiquiti dream machine se, unify, ubiquiti aps, ubiquiti bullet cams, and poe for stuff.
Even my living room lights are poe.
I want a 3d printer. I’m designing my own POE Led lighting system for my living room, halls, closets etc, and running all the lights in my house “poe ++” and a smart home software control center with poe light switches that control lights by ethernet based on how they’re assigned in the software.
So if I want to I’ll be able to change what a 3 switch plate does, maybe it’s christmas and I want to swap switch 3 from turning on my sprinklers to turning on off my projector, w/e.
I want to design all the switch cases, light pod cases, etc and 3d print everything.
My living room will have 9 poe led pods in the ceiling, all RGB W/C white. I have build a media pc that is our tv’s “android” set top box, and I have an hdmi pass through capture card in it, so I want to be able to use the pass through hdmi card to gather the color being sent to the tv to deduce the dominant color so I can program ambient lighting for the whole room.