I purchased a NucBox K11 Mini PC for my AI homelab in June 2026. Setting up JupyterHub on K3s allowed me to spin up pre-configured notebook environments in a single click. Unfortunately, until August, I couldn’t get my hands on the OrangePi AI Studio Pro extension dock.
The dock finally arrived in August. It features 2 Huawei Ascend 310P NPUs providing a combined 352 TOPS / 176 TFLOPS AI processing power for running deep learning workloads based on PyTorch and MindSpore, a significant upgrade over the 20 TOPS AI processing power provided by the OrangePi AIpro (20T) I was using since the beginning of 2026.


With the extension dock in place, I could finally proceed with my remaining setup and run my deep learning experiments with proper NPU acceleration. This article outlines the steps I took to finally make my AI homelab dream a reality.
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