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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?

#391
post #254

I 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.

So RAD !

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

#393
I built a terminal-based gpt client for myself. It uses a sqlite db to store conversations and uses bubbletea for terminal drawing. I use it frequently while I'm writing code. It uses another library to render markdown so that code snippets gpt produces look pretty. It's not perfect by any stretch but it feels great to use it because I made it. https://github.com/collinvandyck/gpterm/

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

#395
I rewrote the UI for an off the shelf WiFi digital photo frame so that it shows the latest raw images sent back from the Perseverance Mars rover. https://prbs23.com/blog/posts/picture-frame-from-mars/

The picture frame secretly ran Android under the hood. Which meant I could replace the app which showed pictures pulled from the manufacturers server, with one which pulls photos from the NASA website. Fortunately they left ADB enabled with root permissions, so it was trivial to replace their startup app with my own. All the source code is public here: https://gitlab.com/prbs23/mars-photo-stream

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

#397
post #367

When I was house-hunting I ended up writing a console app for my wife and I to do a few things: - Pulled down applicable YNAB savings envelope balances and future income calculations from a Google Sheets spreadsheet (which included stock prices for determining RSU payouts) to know how much cash we'd have for down payments at any time in the next 12 months - Allowed us to either give a house price and have it output w…

Any chance you could share this? I made something similar for an investment decision once and i just discovered the realtor i worked with uses it all the time with his clients. I feel like others might like what you’re doing.

I just put pause on a project because i couldn’t figure out a revenue model: mappedby.com

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

#398
post #361

Older 1999-2007 model year Ford vehicles don’t come with an aux input audio option and they have a cd changer under the seat instead. I made an Arduino shield that emulates the CD changer and injects my iPhone’s audio pretending to be a CD. The shield also handles intercepting the car headunit’s playback commands when you press the physical radio buttons on your car so it does a second emulation of a earphone clicker…

2007?! They were putting CD players in cars in 2007?! Are you in the US?

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

#399

I 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 driv…

Man, I'd have trained them to put coins in a little hopper for the food. Start by leaving the coins on a string similar to how you did it. Then set it up so pulling on the string drops the string+coin into the hopper, triggering the food. Then leave coins on the ground near the hopper. Then... start leaving fewer coins around. Soon, an army of racoons will be bringing you street coins in exchange for peanuts.

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

#400
I built a simple recipe meal planner and shopping list generator to manage family meals or dinner parties.

The recipes are stored as free text and the ingredients are parsed out of the text so you can just copy paste most recipes or record them the exact same way that your old family recipes were written down.

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