@shirbo 18:30 start - I’d say the agenda is a typo. Would be awesome to see you there.
I couldn’t get n8n going on NixOS yesterday and spent a bit of time debugging, but I’ll put that down to me having a bit of “night shift brain” rather than anything wrong with NixOS itself.
However, I came back to n8n this morning and instead threw the Docker version on a spare Raspberry Pi 4 to mess about with for a couple of hours.
In the spirit of converting this from “screwing around” to “science” (with thanks to Adam Savage), I’m now writing it all down 
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I managed to get a few random odds and ends going this morning without too much issue. I decided to focus less on the calendar side of things as @shirbo’s use cases have that covered (i.e., I already know it’ll be possible to incorporate calendars) and instead decided to cobble together a mix of other nonsense.
In short, this triggers every hour, and if the light in my office is on, it’ll tell my locally hosted Ollama LLM to email me a poem current wind gust words long, incorporating the number total solar energy generated today. If the light in my office is off, it’ll tell Ollama to email a summary of the Wikipedia article about the current artist of the song I’m listening to on Spotify.
Yes, that’s absolute nonsense, but it was an interesting test of:
- Getting self-hosted n8n going
- Sorting out the SSL side of things (n8n and Spotify are both strict about API calls over SSL)
- Pulling data via Modbus out of my solar inverter
- Using a n8n Community Node (the Modbus one)
- Creating an application via Spotify developer account and querying the Spotify API in n8n
- A few basic HTTP requests (BoM, Wikipedia), SMTP (Send email), and using LLM functions in n8n
- Querying my local Home Assistant
Next step will be to explore some real world use cases and fold n8n into a VM for “production” use. I particularly like the travel time calculation use case of @shirbo’s, so I might start there when I have time to get n8n up and running for some non-whimsical real world uses.
With that, I leave you with a 38 word long poem (38 knot gusts), incorporating the number 9 (9kWh generated) I just received:
Nine wonders in the night,
Each one a guiding light,
The stars above shine bright,
Painting constellations white,
The ocean’s waves below,
A rhythm slow and steady,
Time stands still, I feel anew,
Life’s journey endless view,
In nine, we find our way.