The Story Behind Stag Node
Born at the intersection of enterprise infrastructure obsession, domestic caregiving necessity, and a stubborn refusal to accept surveillance cameras as the only answer to senior safety.
š¦ What is a "Stag Node"?
The name is a synthesis of family insight and tech obsession. My wife and daughter determined that my spirit animal is a stag. Around the same time, I was knee-deep in setting up bare-metal Kubernetes nodes across our home. An AI connected the dots, and Stag Node was born.
It represents the fusion of biological instinct and technical discipline: calm, grounded authority paired with high-performance localized computing power.
ā” "How Does That Work?"
My name is David Crilly, and I have a confession: I cannot leave well enough alone.
My foundational philosophy in life is "How does that work?" Whether it is an IoT communication protocol, a micro-Doppler radar antenna, or a kitchen wall, my instinct is to tear it down, figure it out, and re-engineer it to be more resilient, transparent, and dignified for the human beings living inside it.
š Biomechanical Infrastructure: Meet the Starburst Fleet
If you are a sci-fi fan, you will appreciate our Farscape-inspired naming scheme. Managed declaratively via ArgoCD and GitOps, our multi-cluster environment serves as our enterprise proving ground:
Pilot: 90TB TrueNAS Backbone
Every living leviathan needs a Pilot. In our architecture, Pilot is a massive tower server pushing 90TB of high-density TrueNAS storage. It serves as the central nervous system holding our sovereign datasets, historical telemetry graphs, CAD files, and private cloud together.
Moya: Production & AI Leviathan
Moya is our main production Kubernetes cluster, spanning three mini-PCs and two high-spec desktop nodes. It runs our daily production services, Home Assistant Core, and hosts localized private LLM inference and voice pipelines (Whisper/Piper) with zero cloud round-trips.
Talyn: The Dev Gunship
Named after Moya's fiercely independent offspring, Talyn is a dedicated three-node development cluster. Here, we build custom firmware pipelines, test new mmWave signal filters, and deliberately break things safely before pushing updates to production.
š” The Living Lab: Purpose-Driven Engineering
Enterprise stacks and container orchestrators are powerful toolsābut technology is only as good as the human purpose it serves.
When my eyes need a break from screen glare and Kubernetes YAML, I transfer that engineering energy into our physical homeāremodeling, fabricating custom sensor enclosures on our assembly bench, and caring for our family. Living alongside an aging-in-place family member made a glaring industry failure painfully clear: the tech world expects seniors to adapt to technology, rather than engineering technology to adapt silently to human life.
Big Tech's answer to senior safety is surveillance cameras, intrusive microphones, and bulky emergency pendants that sit forgotten on nightstands. We reject that trade-off entirely. Stag Node was formed to build a better way: 100% passive, zero-cloud ambient intelligence that preserves dignity and gives caregivers real-time peace of mind.
Our Mission Statement
"To enable dignified, resilient aging-in-place through localized ambient intelligenceācombining non-intrusive behavioral telemetry with proactive caregiver alerting to ensure timely intervention while preserving absolute data sovereignty."