Lucas ChavanneIT technician (ES), Geneva

I build systems that run at home, cloud-free: from a sensor wired to a Pico all the way to the Grafana dashboard, through the Proxmox server that hosts it all.

See the projects GitHub

Domo, the data flow of my diploma projectsimulation

About

I graduated as an IT technician (ES) from CFPT Geneva, and I now study business information technology at HEG Geneva, in my 2^nd year. What interests me is the whole chain: choosing the hardware, writing the firmware, moving data around cleanly and making it readable.

Most of my projects run on my own Proxmox server. It hosts my GitLab with its CI/CD pipelines, my media services and my home automation.

My diploma project, Domo, is a complete home automation system, fully local and open source, designed from the wiring of the sensors all the way to automated deployment.

Diploma: IT technician (ES), CFPT Geneva
Currently: 2^nd year of business information technology, HEG Geneva
Region: Geneva, on the French–Swiss border
Areas: Linux servers, virtualisation, IoT, time-series data

Projects

My diploma project in detail, then the projects I build for myself or for others.

Diploma project (TPI)

Domo

A fully local, open-source home automation system. Sensors on Pico 2W and Pi Zero 2W publish their measurements over MQTT to a Raspberry Pi 5 that stores, displays and reacts, with no cloud service at all.

Light, sound, water-leak and motion sensors, with camera capture on detection
Shelly plugs controlled and metered from the same interface
Remote firmware updates for the Picos (OTA)
Phone alerts via ntfy
GitLab CI pipeline for testing and deployment

Raspberry Pi 5
Pico 2W
MicroPython
Mosquitto
Telegraf
InfluxDB
Grafana
Flask
GitLab CI

Source code on GitHub ↗

The journey of a measurement

SensorThe Pico 2W reads the sensor and publishes to an MQTT topic.
BrokerMosquitto on the Pi 5 receives and redistributes.
StorageTelegraf writes the measurement into InfluxDB.
DisplayGrafana plots the history in real time.
ReactionThe Flask API triggers the action or the ntfy alert.

What the hardware taught me

The Pi's 3V3 pin tops out around 300 mA: beyond that, an external regulator is needed.
The Pico's Wi-Fi transmission spikes need a 470 µF and a 100 nF capacitor to stay stable.
A simple NPN transistor and a resistor are enough to drive a fan, no relay needed.
The Camera Module 3 is not detected on its own: you have to force the imx708 overlay.

Other projects

iOS appiOS 17 · Bluetooth LE

LED Car Control

An iPhone app to control my car's LED strips over Bluetooth, instead of the generic app shipped with the controller.
- Colour, brightness and power for the two most common protocols (Triones, ELK-BLEDOM)
- Siri and Shortcuts commands: “Turn on the LEDs”, “Set the LEDs to blue”
- Several controllers saved under a name, with quick switching
- Diagnostics screen and raw hex frame sending to reverse-engineer an unknown protocol
- Swift
- SwiftUI
- Core Bluetooth
- App Intents
For personal use, not published on the App Store.
PWArecettes.lucas-chvnn.ch

My recipes

My recipe notebook, installable on a phone. I add a recipe right in the kitchen, with its photo, rating and steps.
- Installable on iPhone and Android, with a service worker
- Ingredients picked from a dropdown, numbered steps
- Vercel serverless functions and private Vercel Blob storage
- Open to read, write access protected by a password and an HMAC token
- JavaScript
- PWA
- Node.js
- Vercel Functions
- Vercel Blob
Visit the site ↗
Websitephotos.lucas-chvnn.ch

Photo gallery

My photo gallery, mostly cars and places. An AI running on my Mac analyses each photo: make, model and generation for a car, location for a landscape.
- Local, free vision AI (Ollama, Qwen3-VL), no paid API
- Photos sorted by theme and placed on a map using GPS
- Local admin: add, fix, then “Publish” pushes to GitHub and Vercel
- Images resized and stripped of their EXIF metadata
- Node.js
- Express
- Ollama
- sharp
- Leaflet
- Vercel
Visit the site ↗ Source code
Online shopunik-in.com · offline

Unik-in

The online shop of my cousin's hat brand. I built it on Shopify, along with its domain name and email addresses.
- Several hat collections, product pages, a blog and a contact page
- Shopify theme adapted to the brand's identity: logo, typeface, colours
- Domain at OVH connected to Shopify, with email addresses in the brand's name
- Product page and blog copy, photos prepared for the site
- Shopify
- E-commerce
- DNS
- OVH
A project for someone else: the site is no longer online.

Tech stack

The tools I use, and what I actually do with them.

Background

Apprenticeship · 4 years
Federal VET Diploma (CFC) in IT, application development

CFPT Geneva. Programming fundamentals: algorithms, databases, web and desktop development.
Training · 2 years
CFPT Geneva, IT technician (ES)

Linux and Windows server administration, virtualisation, networking, development. School projects including the connected safe Portkey Coffer and a Proxmox vs VMware ESXi comparison. Internship at Genève Roule, later presented in English for the oral exam.
From September 2026 · 2 years
HEG Geneva, business information technology

Direct entry into the 2^nd year thanks to the ES diploma, for two years of study. Currently in the 2^nd year, alongside my infrastructure projects at home.

About

Projects

Domo

The journey of a measurement

Other projects

LED Car Control

My recipes

Photo gallery

Unik-in

Tech stack

Background

Federal VET Diploma (CFC) in IT, application development

CFPT Geneva, IT technician (ES)

HEG Geneva, business information technology

Contact