36 Ways to Control Your Homelab: Exploring the UPS Supervisor Dashboard

Saurab Thakur Saurab Thakur
6 min read
Homelab DIY UPS Server Tech Automation

When you look at a commercial UPS unit, you are usually greeted with a tiny LCD screen, a few plastic buttons, and a frustrating menu system that feels like it was designed in 1995.

If you build your own UPS Supervisor, you get to skip the tiny buttons. Instead, you unlock a beautiful, glowing web dashboard that you can pull up on your phone, tablet, or PC. It is organized into a clean grid of “System Cards.”

In the UPS Supervisor V2.0, there are exactly 36 of these cards. They give you an incredible, granular level of control over every single piece of hardware in your server rack. Let’s take a tour of what you can actually do with this dashboard.

The Power Cards: Your Digital Breaker Box

The most fundamental cards on the dashboard control the physical electricity flowing to your equipment.

  • UPS Power (On/Off): With a single tap, you can command the massive mechanical relays to close, flooding your server rack with power, or gracefully cut the power to zero.
  • The Speaker Toggle: Do you have large studio monitor speakers connected to your PC? They waste a lot of electricity when idling. The dashboard gives you a dedicated button to instantly cut power to your audio gear, completely separate from your computers.
  • Battery Source Switching: The dashboard lets you choose your power source on the fly. You can force the system to run on the massive UPS battery, force it to sip power from the lightweight Network battery, or simply leave it on “Auto” and let the microchip decide what is best.
  • Manual Charger Overrides: If you know a storm is coming and you want to ensure your batteries are 100% topped up, you can manually force the battery charger to turn on, overriding the automatic energy-saving logic.

The Network Commands: Whispering to Your Machines

Controlling raw electricity is great, but cutting the power to a running computer is a bad idea. The dashboard features cards designed to politely ask your computers to change their power states over the local network.

  • PC Wake, Sleep, and Hibernate: You don’t need to physically press the power button on your desktop tower anymore. Tapping “Wake” sends a magic packet over the network to turn your PC on. Tapping “Sleep” or “Hibernate” tells Windows to save your work and power down smoothly.
  • TrueNAS Server Controls: Your NAS (Network Attached Storage) holds all your precious data. The dashboard features dedicated cards that securely talk to the TrueNAS operating system, allowing you to gracefully shut down or reboot the entire server array from your phone.
  • Smart Plug Integration: Got a lamp or an extra fan plugged into an internet-connected smart plug on the other side of the room? The dashboard integrates with third-party smart plugs, letting you switch them on and off from the exact same screen as your UPS.

The “Quick Scene” Macros: One Click, Total Magic

Why tap five different cards when you can tap one? The dashboard features “Scenes,” which are automated macros that execute a complex series of commands.

  • Start Workspace: This is the ultimate “Good Morning” button. You tap it once, and the UPS Supervisor springs into action. It turns on the electrical relays, waits exactly three seconds, sends a wake command to your PC, sends a wake command to your NAS, and powers up your studio speakers. Your entire room comes alive from a single tap.
  • Quiet Night: Heading to bed? Tap this scene. The Supervisor gracefully shuts down your loud desktop PC and studio monitors, but leaves the Network battery silently powering your Wi-Fi router so your phone stays connected all night.
  • Recover Chain: A highly specialized macro for when everything has gone wrong. If a massive outage killed both batteries and everything went dark, tapping this button carefully stages the power return. It turns on the router, waits 60 seconds for the internet to establish, and then boots the heavy servers.

The Red Zone: Emergency Overrides

Sometimes, you need to break the glass and push the big red button. The dashboard hides these dangerous cards behind a strict “long-press” confirmation to ensure you never tap them by accident.

  • Emergency Hibernate: If the storm is right above you and lightning is striking, you can’t afford to wait for normal shutdown timers. This button instantly commands your PC and NAS to save their data and shut down as fast as possible.
  • Force UPS OFF: This is the ultimate kill switch. It physically cuts the latching relay inside the rack, instantly killing all electricity. You only press this if something is going critically wrong.

Conclusion

The 36 system cards on the Astro dashboard represent the ultimate dream for a homelab enthusiast: absolute, granular control. You don’t have to rely on confusing menus or black-box algorithms. You are the pilot, and the dashboard is your cockpit.

Next Steps: What happens when your NAS server turns back on, but all your hard drives are locked with encryption? Discover how the UPS Supervisor uses cutting-edge cryptography and the cloud to securely unlock your data in our final feature!

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