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I've been building our home freedom server, Bitarr with Claude over the last week or so. Here's what Claude has to say about it:

🏴‍☠Introducing Bitarr: A Complete Self-Hosted Freedom Stack

Just finished building an epic home server setup that combines Bitcoin sovereignty with media freedom:

What's in Bitarr:

- ⚡ Full Bitcoin node + Lightning (LND) + LNBits for family banking

- 🎬 Jellyfin + full *arr automation stack (Radarr/Sonarr/Prowlarr)

- 🤖 Local AI with Ollama + Open WebUI (no cloud dependency)

- 📺 HDMI recovery system that auto-fixes display issues after power cuts

- 🔒 Everything behind Nginx Proxy Manager with proper SSL

- 📊 Comprehensive monitoring and testing for all services

Cool features:

- Smart plug integration for device control

- Network optimizations achieving 900+ Mbps on gigabit

- Modular Docker stacks that can run independently

- Automated backups and service recovery

- Family-friendly web interfaces for everything

All config is on GitHub ready to be made open.

Built with help from Claude - took a complex multi-stack setup and made it maintainable. Now my family can request movies through Jellyseerr and pay each other with Lightning, all running on our own hardware!

#selfhosted #bitcoin #lightning #homelab #arr #bitarr

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Discussion

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

nostr:nevent1qqs0pqx0lnwgtwj2ck3u8z3hg6wkpggtv5nj0xv5tvsfktn795msnwsx5lu54

GregAsks 6mo ago

Looks more professional than my old mini HP G2 800 (16gb + 2 TB)😂👍

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

What I find interesting is that we can have an agent that will be able to maintain this (balancing channels, restarting services, applying fixes). Historically it’s been painful to keep stuff like this running (it still is), but the light is at the end of the tunnel where this kind of thing can be kept running for the lay man.

PDJ 6mo ago

🙏

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

Ram upgrade from 32GB to 64GB and RTX3060 > RTX3090 (from another donor)

Contra 6mo ago

Freedom flex: your home server’s harder than most nations’ IT

Queue 6mo ago

how did you setupt *arr for piracy? do you have like a fully made docker image or something like that? i try it everey once in a while but it so boring and long to set everything up

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

They’re all in a stack together with their own network and using gluetun with Proton VPN (wireguard). I couldn’t get QBitorrent to play nicely, so used Transmission instead. Happy to share docker-compose file. Will open the repo up but needs tidying up first.

Queue 6mo ago

Please send!

OzzyHB 6mo ago

Is there Datum server as well, for sovereign mining?

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

What’s a datum server?

OzzyHB 6mo ago

https://ocean.xyz/docs/datum-setup

For created your own block templates

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

Ah ok. Then it passes them to miners you may have - even solo miners. Nice.

“Using Bitcoin Knots is highly recommended. This gives miners fine controls over how they wish to construct their block templates. Other node implementations that support GBT can also be used. This includes Bitcoin Core, but it is severely lacking in template control options. That is unfortunately a centralizing force which partly defeats the purpose of decentralizing block template creation in the first place.”

xiangcai 6mo ago

you're so smart to do the node, should need quite some courage and opsec to play with sats. I'm too dumb even to build a home server using OpenMediaVault and docker containers on a RPi and I'm stuck at trying to tunnel the server thru a VPN IPv6 server.

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

Wouldn’t keep large funds on hot storage like that. I think the rate AI is coming along you will be able to point it at a repo and say “I want that one!” and it will do the whole security check stuff for you.

xiangcai 6mo ago

yeah still, quite impressive work

GermanHodl 6mo ago

Nice, I run a similar stack. What's the host OS ?

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

Kubuntu 22.04 with KDE Plasma with X11. I did try KDE Plasma Bigscreen but didn’t work out. Supposed to have voice control integration. Maybe it’s buggy - or maybe just me. Will revisit though.

royster⚡️ 6mo ago

Dude. Sounds awesome

Josiah Goff 6mo ago

That’s awesome. Currently working on mine. What’s your hardware setup and OS?

aco 6mo ago

Very cool project. I’m not sure I’d want to mix my node with my media and other stuff though. Similar to what Umbrel is doing but you have the sovereignty and peace of mind. 🙏👍

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago

Yeah, it’s a trade iff between having too many PCs all over the place. Am is to have one that I can keep an eye in easier. They’re all on docker containers so pretty separate (like you would with a VM in the cloud). That said, it’s a hot wallet ultimately … so …

aco 6mo ago

Docker containers are definitely the right way to go. I get not wanting multiple machines running all over the house.

HangryHippo 6mo ago

Hi Ben, how will this be different than what Start9 and Umbrel are doing? Will it be built into an ISO for spinning up a VM on Proxmox or is the theory to build all from source?

Ben Weeks ⚡ 6mo ago 💬 1

This is mainly for my own use really, but could open up the source. Documenting as I go (including hardware) so Claude Code or similar could spin the machine up from documentation, docker compose files, and scripts.

Start9 and Umbrel are great, but this is really meant for a bulky piece of hardware for all your home server needs running docker containers - including running reasonably sized AI models locally.

Hardware: AMD Ryzen 5 7600, 64GB RAM, RAID array, Nvidia 3090, XBox Kinect camera and microphone, etc.

DrShift 1mo ago

Curious. What's the Xbox Kinect camera doing?

Ben Weeks ⚡ 1mo ago

Not a lot at the moment, but for family calls etc. Has a microphone array which is pretty good for picking up audio from around the room. Would also like it to be used for Nodie (local AI agent I’m working on) to know who’s she’s talking to and distinguish different voices etc.

SelfBankt 6mo ago

Sounds awesome. Are you familiar with ZimaOS? https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/ZimaOS

unixmonks 5mo ago

Cool. What LLM are you running and at what resolution? How’s the performance (tps) and accuracy on the single 3090? Do you think it can replace Claude?

Ben Weeks ⚡ 5mo ago

Trying a few different ones at the moment, such as Llama3.2:3b, qwen2.5:3b, mistral:7b, deepseek-r1:7b and deepseek-r1:14b. Right now qwen2.5:3b (Q4_K_M) is doing around 144 TPS (according to Claude Code).

Deepseek-r1:14b was too much for it.

Here’s what I’m working on:

https://github.com/knowall-ai/Nod.ie

I.e. an agent that runs on your machine that you can just talk to, all running locally, that ultimately can call MCP Servers concerning the operation of a Bitcoin Lightening Node. Under the hood it’s using a fork of Unmute for the backend services, but I’ve added MCP tool calling capability and “thinking”.

However, this is also using a lot of other GPU activities such as Speech-To-Text (TTS) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) and I was even trying to add video processing stuff (agent facial animation) using MuseTalk but it can’t quite all squeeze on a single RYX 3090 (24GB). Looking at options to run a second graphics card (until then putting animated AI on hold):-)

I don’t think it will replace Claude Code (I use that a lot to build it) because of the clever way they grab context of a project code base and alike. If you’re referring to Claude Desktop, I’m using Open WebUI and seems pretty comparable (at least to Open AI - you can even get results from your local Ollama instance and compare it to results from OpenAI API which is pretty cool).

unixmonks 5mo ago

Have you tried goose?

Ben Weeks ⚡ 5mo ago

No, I haven’t actually, just read about it. So it’s nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m's baby AI :-) Looks like a similar concept with locally running AI, full open source stack. Even uses an Electron App for the UI too. Will check it out thanks! nostr:npub16l0ck0s5zened29dsaqtqm6z0t4fmk2mwtszw64fz7fppcnls8mss3yj9s

unixmonks 5mo ago

It’s more along the lines of Claude code

Ben Weeks ⚡ 5mo ago

Ah ok. Will give it a try. Using AI to build AI is pretty surreal especially how you can see it adjusting the way it’s “brain” works.

Ben Weeks ⚡ 5mo ago

Being able to talk to Claude Code rather than type and then realise half of what you wrote didn’t get input as it asked a question would be nice. Perhaps Goose does that. Would allow for much more context to be passed to the agent.