Balkon Pi

A Raspberry Pi Zero W mounted near the balcony acts as a small, self-contained smart-balcony controller: light control, an internet radio player, sensor readings, and its own backup/monitoring, all on very modest hardware.

What it does

• Audio output via a DIY PWM-to-analog circuit on two GPIO pins — the Pi Zero has no built-in audio jack, so this is a well-known community workaround using a small RC filter.
• Physical controls: a push button for the balcony light and a toggle switch for music playback, read directly via GPIO.
• HTTP communication with an ESP32-based balcony light controller.
• Internet radio via a lightweight command-line audio player, controlled by a small custom tool ported from an earlier bathroom-Pi project.

Monitoring & backup, even on tiny hardware

Despite the very limited RAM, this Pi still participates in the same Prometheus monitoring pattern as the rest of the fleet — with the metrics collector's default configuration trimmed down to only the essential collectors, since the full default set noticeably overloaded the CPU on this specific board. It also runs a nightly rsync backup of its own configuration to the NAS over the internal network.

Planned next steps

• Adding a USB webcam stream, mirroring the pattern already used for the 3D printer.
• Migrating onto the planned isolated IoT network segment once that's fully set up.