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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?

#501

Post by busyant »

I made a "laser-beam-break" camera trigger for my Nikon D750, which I use to capture images of hummingbirds at my feeder.

Instead of paying $125 for this ... (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1337050-REG/pluto_tri...)

I decided to build one using an Arduino. I probably spent more than $125 on the project, but I ended up buying a lot of hobbyist electronics parts, soldering gun, etc.

I learned a bit about what Arduino can do, learned some baby electronics.

And I have some nice pics of hummingbirds.

https://flickr.com/photos/184781347@N05/52648636091/in/datep...

https://flickr.com/photos/184781347@N05/52325370300/in/datep...

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

#503

Post by zbtaylor1 »

I built a working version of the Christmas lights from Stranger Things (that Joyce used to talk to Will in the upside down) for a friend's Halloween party. It used an arduino board, a string of addressable LEDs, and a little web interface that guests could use to send messages to the lights.

It was so much fun to build and a hit at the party. I wish I had the opportunity to build more things like it :)

https://github.com/zbtaylor/stranger-things-lights

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

#504

Post by nydev »

michaeltbuss wrote: post #435

Every night, at 3 AM, my cat will meow and paw at the bedroom door like a banshee. I tried everything to get him to stop, including the off-the-shelf air sprayers that trigger with motion. Eventually, I decided to build my own. I 3D printed a case and trigger for an air sprayer can, created some electronics with an ESP32 and RF trigger, and wrote my own "motion detection" logic - this time with an ultrasonic sensor,…

Very clever. I would love to re-create this, we have the same issue with our cat.

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

#505

Post by kilon »

Built a live coding library for python that allows me to reload code I edited while it was executing. It has repl and debugger support and it can be run even for embedded python. It's pretty granular so it can reload modules or even individual objects. Unlike the existing module reload python function it can change object references to the updated code and delete old objects and their references from memory. This way in the next call only the latest code is executed. I built something similar for C code too.

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

#506

Post by cookiengineer »

Two years ago I decided to built my own web browser, with the underlying idea to use the internet more efficiently (and to force cache everything).

Took a while to find the architecture, but it's still an unfinished ambitious project. You can probably spend forever working on HTML and CSS fixes alone...

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

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

#507

Post by imstil3earning »

jo-m wrote: 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.

wow that is so cool!

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

#508

Post by dom96 »

jdemaeyer wrote: post #288

I used to love discovering new music through Spotify's Song Radio feature. But somewhere along the way, they started personalizing it so much that every radio is now basically an echo chamber of the same songs I already know, most of which I have even already added to my Liked Songs. I built myself a small service to "disable" (work around) Spotify's hyperpersonalization by giving me the Song Radio as an anonymous us…

Really awesome. Took me a while to figure out how to get a Song Radio playlist though :)

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

#509

Post by noman-land »

jo-m wrote: 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.

This is so cool!!

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

#510

Post by rahimnathwani »

aetch wrote: 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…

This is awesome! How did you figure out the signalling protocol between the head unit and the CD changer?
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