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

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

#161

Post by system2 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #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 nu…

How do you keep water touching sensors working long term? I tried similar sensors but they all get rusted / oxidized to work properly after a certain time.

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

#162

Post by davchana »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #149

My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels. She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio,…

Would love to see a blog about this setup. I, not old, always want to dump much of my music & simply want to listen whatever is next (& miss it if I don't listen) just like radio.

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

#163

Post by rhizome31 »

cobbzilla wrote: post #110

My mom digitized many many old family videos, and wanted them online for sharing with family (including elderly & not-super-tech-savvy relatives). She asked me “should I just upload them all to a YouTube channel?” Thankfully it was a phone call so my mom didn’t see my aghast expression. I prefer that big tech not index this stuff! Better to keep “in the family” Seriously why does big tech deserve this free & super-pr…

Hey, sounds like a very cool project.

I'm wondering: have you considered setting up a Peertube instance and what were the reasons for not doing it?

Other question about not giving away your private data to big tech: Why is S3 better than a private YouTube channel?

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

#164

Post by feiss »

simonsarris wrote: post #53

I built carefulwords.com simply because I wanted to type a word into the address bar and get a large list of synonyms and some historical quotes using the word quickly. For example: https://carefulwords.com/solitude https://carefulwords.com/think etc. Also unlike thesaurus.com, the search bar actually focuses so you can just start typing! It's not perfect, I need to do a lot of editing, but nonetheless I use it almos…

this is lovely!! neat, clean and useful. I'm gonna use it, thanks for making it!

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

#165

Post by fanick »

modeless wrote: post #69

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.…

My related story: we have door phone system in our apartment house and I wanted to get a notification whenever our flat got buzzed. I hacked the phone in our flat - attached a circuit directly to the wires leading to the coil of the buzzer and through arduino to the pc. Then I stitched together some code utilizing firebase to send notifications. Worked like a charm until google began to require credit cards for the free stuff.

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

#167

Post by tipsysquid »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #149

My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels. She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio,…

I love this for her and for me. Best gift you can give to a music lover

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

#168

Post by texuf »

I built a website that you can bring up in multiple browser windows, or on multiple adjacent monitors attached to independent computers. Each browser displays a unique QR code. A user can navigate to a second webpage, activate their camera, and point their camera at the QR codes. Each QR code will switch to a unique AR code, then the user can project a single continuous image across all the monitors. It mostly works but I’m missing some 3d math to make the image line up perfect when the angles are weird.

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

#169

Post by okaleniuk »

My father was an amateur historian. He used to work with a lot of pictures often of poor quality. I guess his worst was a photo of a road sign printed in a book sometime in the 70s, and then recently not even scanned but taken from a book page with a phone. So I made a tool for him that allows to undo unwanted bending and also helps with the dirt: https://github.com/akalenuk/unpager

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

#170

Post by noahtallen »

paws wrote: post #71

I don't know if it qualifies as the "most interesting" but as a travel bug I wrote a little airfare scraper that I got plenty of value out of. Basically it's a script that scrapes several places for flight deals and "mistake fares" and notifies my phone if it matches with my city. No searching like other flight apps, you basically just set it up and wait, and various places will pop up. Helps if you're in a hub city…

Scott’s cheap flights (going.com now) has basically implemented this in a nice little paid service. I got sub-$400 roundtrip direct from Seattle to Dublin. If you can snag even just a deal a year, it’s well worth the small yearly price!
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