updated 20 Sep 2026
Who or what is CheetahLab?
Why this site exists, what goes on it and what does not: live data from a weather station and a LoRaWAN gateway, tools born out of building automation, designs for the 3D printer — and the detours that led there.
CheetahLab is not a company, not an offer and not advertising (except for my own projects 😁) — it is more of a project log. This is where I write down what I am building, what went wrong along the way and what worked in the end. Tools that come out of it are published free of charge on GitHub and/or Docker Hub, since most of them get to do their work as containers on a Synology NAS.
A logbook, not a showroom
Most of my projects end up in a folder on a hard drive and are forgotten a year later. What is missing is not the time to build them, but the place where the result is written down: why it is solved this way and not another, which detour turned out to be a dead end, and what I would do exactly the same way again next time.
That is what this site is for. For me first — and if somebody else gets something out of it, all the better: as inspiration, as a different way to solve something, or as a use case nobody had thought of before.
Live data instead of screenshots
Part of this site shows data that is being produced right now. The weather station on the property reports its readings over MQTT, and the raw stream is turned into hourly, daily, monthly and yearly values here, including records, a data interface and exports. The same goes for my LoRaWAN gateway on the roof: what it reports about itself is presented here properly, instead of as a screenshot from some point in the past.
Tools from my own workflow
The second part is the tools. They all come from the same shortage: something I need every day did not exist — or not the way I need it. The focus is on building automation and my running EisBär visualisation, and above all on what translates between the worlds: KNX, Modbus, Homematic and MQTT.
Whatever comes out of one system has to arrive in the other — with the right units, at the right time, and without anyone patching in a line at night. That is exactly what the tools here do.
And the rest
On top of that comes whatever else turns up: 3D designs, made almost entirely for my own needs — every now and then for friends or family as well. Some of them are available for download on MakerWorld and Makeronline. Plus notes from the workshop, and occasionally a find that is worth writing down.
If there is a common thread, it is this: it is here because I built, measured, developed or repaired it myself.
Enjoy having a look around, Dirk