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Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

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131–140 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#131
I'm building an automatic file ingestion and processing pipeline which will run on a Raspberry Pi 3. It'll do some mundane tasks like renaming, and/or converting video files and sending to relevant people.

It's like Node Red, but simpler and less resource intensive.

The idea is to get the file to the "Inbox" of the system, and rest is automagically handled.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#132
Nothing special, but I didn't want to share my dietary habits with an unknown number of third parties, so I built my own calorie tracker. I didn't use anything fancy, I just ran Grist on my home server with a half dozen tables. Had to rewrite it a couple of times to support stuff like recipes, but it's good enough for my purposes. Didn't even need to add auth to it, I just use Tailscale on my personal devices to access the server from anywhere without exposing it to the internet.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#133
Made a desktop app for homebrew beer recipes.

There are plenty of brewing tools out there, but ito data model and workflow they are all basically descendants of ProMash. I wanted something that approached home brewing with a focus on process instead of ingredients.

My data model of a "recipe" is a DAG of typed process steps each of which can have ingredients attached. Liquid volumes move through the DAG and are modified at each step. Outputs of the recipe are at the leaf nodes. This model can represent any wacky brew day you can dream up - including and not limited to multiple mashes, splitting or combining volumes pre or post mash/sparge/boil/cool/ferment/whenever, packaging wort, etc. The regular tools usually can't even represent a partigyle batch properly.

Honestly for my regular 20L single-infusion no-sparge brew day it is probably slightly less convenient than say Beersmith. But for unusual situations it shines. For eg this past festive season I found myself needing to stock up quickly. Designing a 40L "one mash, one boil, two different beers [1]" double batch brew day was easy, and hitting all the numbers along the way for such a mad-hatter exercise was incredibly cool.

[1] Scottish Export and Sweet Stout

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#134
I built myself an automated hydroponic grow tent.

It measures and corrects pH, electrical conductivity, oxidation reduction potential, temperature of the air and water, water level, and humidity. It also automates pumps, lights, and fans (I know people normally advise against this). None of it is particularly sophisticated, but I’m really proud of it.

I initially used a deep water culture and later moved on to the nutrient film technique. It produces a lot of greens and herbs — way more than I ever expected — and it’s remarkably hands off. I recently left it to do its thing for almost 3 months before I had to intervene, and the problem wasn’t the water, nutrients, or the system failing explicitly. The plants just got too big for their channels and as they became stressed, they developed some pest issues. It was such a cool and empowering experience to see real world automation Just Work.

The whole thing is powered by an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. It’s a great little controller.

I’m currently designing my first PCB to consolidate the system onto a single board so my friends can easily build their own. It’s not extremely cheap, but it’s not too expensive either and you get a tremendous amount of food from it. It’s such a fun hobby.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#135
A few projects:

- a in car audio system that has physical buttons and text to speech output instead of a distracting display panel. Worked really well for a few months but my soldering wasn’t (then) up to par so it eventually fell apart.

- a Bash replacement shell, which I later open sourced and now have a few users beyond myself. But it started out as a personal project not intended to be used by anyone but myself. like is in my profile (if anyone is interested)

- home automation software which manages everything from internet management through to some physical stuff like lights. At one stage I did also have Alexa skills and an Android app written to interact with it but I rarely ever use them so didn’t bother keeping those Alexa skills nor Android app up to date and just use the web portal (or SSH) the very few times I need to override any default automation.

- back in the Windows 95 / 98 era I wrote a desktop shell to replace the standard one. It was inspired by Linux desktop environments though I probably didn’t realise it at the time.

- currently I’m building a robot with my son. It has object detection, wheels, speakers and will have some rudimentary Alexa-like voice control.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#136
A desktop application with double countdown timer, styled as a digital clock. One counter measured the days until a friend's farewell party before they move abroad, the other was going towards a festival's opening date at a later time (when we would see this friend again).

I didn't really plan this part, but since going past their target date they started counting upwards and have accumulated 4500 days or so.

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#137
- A ChatGPT shell that integrates well into my editor of choice https://xenodium.com/chatgpt-shell-available-on-melpa

- A scriptable screenshot/video capture utility https://xenodium.com/recordscreenshot-windows-the-lazy-way

- An iOS habit tracker that's neither cloud-based, nor needs an account, social, wants my attention, data, etc. https://flathabits.com

- An iOS scratch pad that removes further friction than typical note apps https://xenodium.com/scratch-a-minimal-scratch-area

- An iOS org mode app 'cause there are lots of Markdown ones but almost no org mode ones https://plainorg.com

- A way to easily record more complex commands (ie. ffmpeg) and make them reusable for the future https://xenodium.com/seamless-command-line-utils

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#138

I built myself an automated hydroponic grow tent. It measures and corrects pH, electrical conductivity, oxidation reduction potential, temperature of the air and water, water level, and humidity. It also automates pumps, lights, and fans (I know people normally advise against this). None of it is particularly sophisticated, but I’m really proud of it. I initially used a deep water culture and later moved on to the nu…

Would love to see a blog post on this or something!

Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

#140

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box. I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone.…

Haha, I also built exactly this!

I had mine integrated with Home Assistant and got notifications via a telegram integration.

I also had mine setup so me or my room-mate in our apartment telegram group could register new codes, or generate single-use codes.

I also considered building it into a paid app, but came to the same conclusion :-)

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