I attempted to build flight control software for a quadcopter[1]. I had a few major life changes around this time and it got packed up and I stopped working on it before I got the PID controllers worked out. But I essentially wrote a small game engine and had to learn a little calculus along the way.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#332I built a 3D visualiser that overlays semantic topics and sentences of documents with different "embedding types and orders"[1] using Natural Language Processing.
It colours each document with the same colour. You can see how two documents overlap, semantically - it's pretty awesome for Job Role/CV overlays for example, or educational resources and exams - a mix merging of colour shows both equally discuss something... missing colour means one document doesn't.
Since it's semantic, depending on the embedding, the gaps in-between spots make a lot of sense intuitively, and you can sometimes even see how the conclusion of a document ends up in a different semantic space to the start as such (even though there is no time data, you just notice the later topics are semantically in a different space to the earlier ones for the same document)
[1] Similarity based, NLI based, GPT-raw etc.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#333Back in 2001-ish, looking for a rental house with good public transport. Screen scraped the entire realestate.com.au database overnight, then fed the addresses into some mapping API that gave me coordinates, and caluclated the distance from those addresses to the addresses of Zone 1 train stations.
Also had descriptions, so wrote a simple regex based scorer that classified the descriptions by keywords that I valued. Spat out a hitlist of likely candidate houses to go inspect.
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Also wrote a basic wedding registry that allowed people to scan our list of things we wanted and say they had purchased them, or were interested and it gave a list of others who might want to go in on a group purchase. No privacy, but it was only sent to friends. Circa 2004.
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Finally, wrote a diary and calendar tool which took emails with very simply structured subjects and built a static website showing travels through Europe in 2002. Could email from any net cafe with any email address and it would update the travel diary, or a website with a calendar saying which city we were in and how we were traveling to the next one. Friends could elect to get immediate updates or a daily summary. Purely static built from cron and email archives. Worked like a charm.
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More recently, hmm... as treasurer for various choir things I've written a ton of little commandline tools which give very quick access to data and allow tracking who owes what and logging their payments into a database, and tools which generate email invoices and receipts.
Everything else is either opensource or work stuff. And I don't code so much these days either, though this week I started diving into Python to create tools that help keep data for our marketing team up-to-date without manually copying stuff around, and some maintenance work on code I wrote 15 years ago which is still running really nicely but needs some updates.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#334I trained the raccoons that visit my house at night. I started them out getting a peanuts from a water bottle. Then I tied the bottle to a rope. Then kept raising the bottle higher. At that point, I built an automated feeder system using a linear actuator activated by pulling the rope with the bottle attached. It had LEDs that were green / red to show when the feeder would / wouldn't dispense peanuts. It was all driven by an ESP32, it even had a web page on our LAN reporting how many correct / incorrect pulls were done. Over the coarse of a few nights they figured it out. Raccoons are so cool.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#335I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it. It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/ . Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.
I wonder if there's open data or an open API for the schedule or location information. That way, you could include information on which train is which.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#336I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it. It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/ . Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.
Nice job! I would be really happy if I ever finished my own hobby projects this well.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#337Some years ago, I was annoyed by 1password not having any support for Linux and local vaults, and their vault spec was open, so I build a JavaFX app that allows me to read/view my passwords and OTP tokens.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#338I realised I have quite a few random scripts I use for myself or to improve my usual workflow. Recently decided to start blogging again and figured some of them might make interesting reading for others. Lately:
Made my monitor an "ambient tv" by reverse engineering the bluelooth lights and sending them pixel colours: https://www.reaminated.com/reverse-engineer-led-to-convert-m...
I also wanted to use ChatGPT over my own files and documents. Whilst my personal system is a bit more complex, created an end-to-end tutorial of my learnings to get started with using your own docs: https://www.reaminated.com/run-chatgpt-style-questions-over-...
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#339I made a Mac app that turns my webcam light on and off with the camera. It’s buggy, but I use it every day and I love it
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#340My 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,…
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