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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?

#181

Post by jen_h »

* A script that periodically screenscraped booked-up campsite reservation sites for cancellations during dates I wanted and sent me text messages (thanks, Twilio!). We got to stay at a bunch of amazing places at the last minute this way. We’re currently grounded, but I recently ran it again for my parents and was shocked to find it still worked!

* An Alexa app that provides a search interface to Old Time Radio shows on archive.org and saves your place (this was technically for my mother-in-law, the proof-of-concept with arcade sounds for my spouse). We all ended up using it a ton, though, it was kind of magical (the random function was really fun). I also set up an Alexa app to read me recent CVEs, but it’s more of a goofy parlor trick than useful. ;)

* A Rube Goldbergian bunch of terrible scripts that I can feed PDFs to, OCR, poorly-translate (using the expected engines or my own diymodel) and generate epubs from. And a bunch of scripts that convert Markdown to LaTeX and epub for personal book publishing projects.

Thanks for asking this question, it’s so neat to see everyone’s responses! I might ping my spouse on this post, too, who’s developed a crazy amount of personal projects that combine software and hardware to fixup our/our families’ lives.

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

#182

Post by dgently7 »

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.…

I had a buzzer that was basically a button on the handset of a phone which would Open the door, I wasn’t allowed to open it up to wire directly into it so I slapped together a node red script on a rpi with a servo that would push the button to buzz open the door anytime I said “open seasame” with Siri via an iOS automation thingy. Never needed to carry keys again while we lived there.

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

#183

Post by fellerts »

Our apartment has a key fob system to open the front door as well as an intercom system so people can call up and request to be let in. I put a Raspberry Pi Zero W inside the intercom receiver unit hooked up to the "open door" button. The Pi receives on a webhook that I control from a shortcut on my smartphone, so I can let people in even when I'm not home (or let myself in if I've forgotten the fob). The Pi also texts me whenever the doorbell rings. Not the sexiest project, but definitely the one that gets the most use!

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

#184

Post by LeoPanthera »

My Raspberry Pis all netboot. I have a bunch of them around the house. Some play music, some play games, some are smart TVs. Because they all boot from the LAN, there's no card to wear out, and I can change what OS they boot into just by renaming a file. It's simple, but intensely useful.

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

#185

Post by LeoPanthera »

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,…

What transmitter did you use?

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

#186

Post by alpaca128 »

Not sure about interesting, but I wrote a cli tool to apply boolean set operations on lines of text, so e.g. I can get the intersection of the lines in three different files, or all lines piped into stdin that do not appear in a certain file, or merge the lines from multiple files without duplicates. I made it because this specific task came up repeatedly in my bash scripting but solving it in bash is ugly and really, really slow.

And right now I am working on my own modal text editor which might never be used by anyone else. Just for fun and to see whether some Vim features could be improved or done in other interesting ways. tl;dr so far: Vim does things really damn well, sometimes to a point you don't even think about it because it simply never fails. That said I did manage to finally solve a tiny issue with the keybinding system that always bugged me, resulting in support for smooth text macros as a side effect.

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

#187

Post by kolinko »

When I was 15 years old and my sister was 4 or 5 years old, I wrote a pascal program that showed a big letter on a screen when my sister pressed such letter on a keyboard.

She had fun pressing letters on a keyboard and then seeing them on the screen - possibly learning alphabet and keyboard layout at the same time :)

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

#188

Post by Aerbil313 »

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…

I’m very interested, is it possible for you to open-source it? Also, what are its absolute dependencies? Does it depend on daylight? Fresh air from outside? Stored chemicals? Is water/air recyled? What is the reason behind you making this? I’m preparing for Collapse and want to do such a thing soon. If you can open-source it, it would be very cool and helpful.

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

#190

Post by soren1 »

A few years ago I traded cryptocurrency extensively. I eventually ended up with a tax nightmare, needing to account for thousands of trades across several exchanges. After months of talking with my accountant and tax office, I eventually built https://github.com/dleber/capitalg

It was still a lot of work aggregating trade histories from various exchanges into a standardized schema, but I took some comfort in understanding the process. I also avoided the need to share exchange API keys and trading data with 3rd party accounting tools.

If you discover any bugs, please don't tell the tax authorities.

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