Hello! My name is Stratos (yes, that is my real name). I’m a 15 year old student from Athens, Greece, who loves embedded systems, homelabs, and really anything to do with computers.
Reach out: @sthivaios on discord or [email protected]
Here are some links you might be looking for: GitHub, more soon™
I’m quite an indecisive person, which means I’ve ended up playing with so much stuff, most of which has ended up becoming a legitimate interest lol.
Here are some of my favorites:
I’ve always been fascinated by electrical circuits. When I was around 8 years old, I used to watch so many videos on YouTube about electronics, and the hours and hours of repair videos in front of the living room TV definitely contributed to my nearsightedness. Come to think of it, my parents have definitely had brighter ideas than letting their 9 year old play with appliances, but that’s life.
At some point, I took a LEGO robotics course which showed me how awesome it is to build something from scratch and watch it work flawlessly (well… almost flawlessly… in my defense I was 10) afterwards.
Some time in late 2022, I decided to have a go at blinking a couple of LEDs with the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi that was sitting on my desk which was way easier than I had expected. The result? I fell in love with using code to make hardware do cool stuff. My first ever project was a web app that let you toggle a bunch of LEDs on and off on a breadboard, through that same Pi. Boring, I know, but it was kinda cool too as I sent the link to some Discord friends and watched the little lights blink while someone controlled them from the other side of the world.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned a ton of things, like programming ESP32 boards with ESP-IDF, designing PCBs in KiCad, using protocols like MQTT to make IoT devices, and even built a weather station!
In 2026, I’ll attempt to build my own remotely-controlled LoRA custom modular automatic irrigation controller (wow that’s a lot of words) for remote deployments… we’ll see how that one goes.
Yeah, of course I’ve got a homelab… Don’t get too excited though… It consists of my old PC with a Ryzen 5600x and 16 poor gigabytes of slow DDR4 RAM, an HP Compaq with an i3 taken out of some workplace, and a little Dell Optiplex acting as a Proxmox Backup Server haha.
Everything runs on Proxmox. I LOVE Proxmox. LXCs are probably the coolest thing ever and you can deploy stuff so easily and quickly with them, it makes self hosting actually fun. I host so much stuff, including Grafana and Prometheus, Windows Server, Home Assistant, Vaultwarden (yes, I self host a password manager), a separate DHCP server (isc-dhcp), PiHole and AdGuard Home (yes, both), Plex, and so much more.
Yeah, a weird one, I know. I’ve always been into phones for some reason. Here in Greece, I grew up with analog phones and the classic PSTN RJ-11 phone jacks in the wall. Did you know there are analog PBX boxes? Well, 10 year old me bought one back then, and turned our home landline into a small call center with a bunch of analog cordless phones that could call each other. Until I found out what VoIP was…
It must’ve been some time around 2021 when I watched a video about 3CX, and still barely knowing what it even was, I had a go at setting it up. Eventually I got some weird Grandstream deskphone and set it up with 3CX and, once again, forced my poor parents to install the app on their phones so I could call their extension from my deskphone haha. I learned what IVRs, ring groups, trunks and all that good stuff was.
But (of course there’s a “but”) then… at some doctor’s appointment or something, a Cisco 7900 phone caught my eye. If you’ve ever configured those, you probably know exactly why those wouldn’t just work with 3CX… but gues who didn’t know that. Over the next 3 years I fell into one of the deepest rabbit holes, where I ended up buying 6 of those phones, learned how to use FreePBX, deployed it about a thousand times on Proxmox, and hacked the absolute heck out of it, to get it to work with those 20 year old phones. Fun fact, this process is documented incredibly poorly and one of the goals of this blog is to, in fact, show exactly how I set everything up and got FreePBX to work with Cisco deskphones.
Web dev is how I started programming. The first thing I ever learned to use was HTML (and no, its not a programming language) and CSS. I slowly started making some little utilities and apps with vanilla JavaScript. Needless to say it sucked, but it was fun to build my first web apps.
Since then, I’ve learned how to build full-stack web apps with NodeJS, and frameworks including ExpressJS and NextJS. The website you’re reading this on, is completely custom and created from scratch!
I also love developing REST APIs, and I’ve created a pretty cool suite of web apps for the Cisco deskphones. Yes, web apps on deskphones.
I got my first 3D printer, a Bambulab P1S in June of 2024. Since then I’ve learned how to use Fusion360 to design my own enclosures for projects, replacement parts, and so much more… Probably my unhealthiest habit is wasting rolls and rolls of filament to print stuff to organize my workbench… only for it to still look like an absolute mess.
Feel free to take a look at my Printables account @sthivaios_2262057, though at the time of writing this I’ve only posted two models that I doubt would be very useful to a lot of people, lol.
I also love to repair devices, anything from my own iPhone to relatives’ laptops and home appliances.
Anyway, that was a lot… Thank you for taking the time to read it haha. Again, feel free to reach out, even to just say hi! I’ll go sleep now, it’s literally 7:15am. Bye!
You can find the source code for this website here: https://github.com/sthivaios/sthivaios.dev
Stratos Thivaios © 2025