DELLigieren turns a low-power control node (e.g. an Optiplex-style office PC) into the central committee of your homelab.
It wakes your high-power workstation only when tasks require it, supervises activity, and aggressively suspends it again to eliminate idle power waste.
This creates a fully automated, eco-friendly compute mesh where heavy workloads run on demand, not 24/7.
Modern homelabs often rely on a big, power-hungry machine for tasks like:
- AI workloads
- compiling
- video encoding
- gaming / streaming
- media processing
…but these machines waste huge amounts of power when idle.
DELLigieren solves this by introducing a lightweight “manager” node that:
- stays always-on at minimal wattage
- detects when services or workloads need compute
- wakes the heavy machine instantly via HID / WoL
- tracks state and activity
- suspends the worker as soon as it's idle
- provides an API + registry for services to request wake time
This achieves massive energy savings without sacrificing performance.
DELLigieren consists of three layers:
- Runs DELLigieren daemon
- Monitors service activity
- Sends wake signals (HID, USB, BTLE, or WoL)
- Suspends the worker when idle
- Hosts registry of tasks and uptime windows
- Provides heavy compute on demand
- Runs tasks triggered by the controller
- Auto-suspends after work is done
- Rich state machine (awake, idle, pending tasks, cooldown)
- Service registry with priorities & time windows
- Network activity monitoring
- REST API for orchestrating tasks
- Event-driven scheduling
For full architecture details, see the complete design document:
Early Development / Specification Phase
The architecture is fully drafted.
Implementation begins next.
Feedback, issues, and contributions are welcome at all stages.
- 🔌 HID-based wake (uHID virtual keyboard)
- 🌐 Wake-on-LAN as fallback
- 🔋 Aggressive power-saving policies
- 📡 Service-aware scheduling
- 🧠 Multi-stage state machine
- 🛠 Systemd-managed daemon
- 🖥 REST API for external orchestration
- 📊 Dashy/Home Assistant integration planned
- 🔒 Clear separation of control vs. worker nodes
Discussions, ideas, and pull requests are welcome — especially for:
- Linux input & HID subsystem quirks
- systemd integration
- Python daemon structure
- suspend/wake edge cases
Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3).
This ensures DELLigieren remains free, collective, and open for all.
Together, we can build an energy-aware, worker-driven, eco-conscious homelab that only consumes power when the people demand it.