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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?

#521

Post by pawptart »

I built an emulator for HUB75 LED matrix panels. https://github.com/ty-porter/RGBMatrixEmulator

One of the side projects I work on is a scoreboard that displays MLB scores. It's highly configurable -- you buy the size panel you want and a Raspberry Pi, install the software, and you can configure it to display games, standings, and news headlines for your favorite team or division.

The problem is that the hardware is purchased by the end user, so it can come in many different sizes. I think we officially support 6 or 7 sizes right now, and each panel can be a chunk of change if you get a nice one. If we wanted to test on every device that means I need to shell out 50 bucks x 7 sizes, plus Raspberry Pi and wiring adapter, so not insignificant for a hobby project. Instead, I wrote a drop-in replacement emulator that makes it super simple to emulate any size panel across a variety of display types.

The most advanced display adapter spins up a minimal webserver and serves emulated images over a websocket, meaning you can display your panel over the network on pretty much any device with a web browser.

I write about it quite a bit, if further interested: https://blog.ty-porter.dev/categories.html#emulation-ref

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

#522

Post by schemescape »

md2blog: creates a tiny (a few kilobytes per page, with no JavaScript) blog from Markdown files, with two features that I couldn’t find elsewhere:

* Links between Markdown files “just work” (both when viewing the Markdown source on GitHub and in the final HTML version of the site), including anchors

* Posts are automatically tagged based on directory structure (e.g. all files in “posts/linux” are tagged with “linux”)

Bonus: my entire site hot-rebuilds on my 12 year-old netbook in under a second (with a few tweaks that I should probably publish a new build for).

https://jaredkrinke.github.io/md2blog/

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

#523

Post by sowbug »

withinboredom wrote: post #276

A deadman's switch connected to a manner of things. It basically works by 'non-existence' instead of existence and fires a webhook once something stops. For example, if my computer is turned off for a couple of weeks, it will send an email to loved ones. When I go day hiking, something similar happens when my phone loses service/power for more than a couple hours and sends a low-quality gps track. Basically it's if-t…

You could imagine a combination of a Tor-like architecture and Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme to construct a scavenger-hunt encryption system. Maybe 10 dead-man-switch utilities around the world agree to reveal X when Y happens (or doesn't happen), but their policies aren't even revealed until the first N secrets are broadcast. That way you can distribute the risk of collision, and meter the rate of a final secret being revealed or job being executed.

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

#524

Post by sowbug »

Slartie wrote: post #119

I have glued BLE beacons onto my trash cans in the backyard and written a Python program for a Raspberry Pi that uses its Bluetooth interface to detect the beacons and keep track of whether they are present or not. It also downloads the trash collection calendar from the local utility provider responsible for collecting them and produces an overview over all four types of trash cans with info on their whereabouts (in…

For those of us thinking of putting beacons on everything, have you found a cheap open device that you like? Tile and Chipolo are too expensive for certain near-frivolous use cases.

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

#525

Post by steedsofwar »

Not as exciting as some here, but helped me at times where i couldn't be at my desk however still be 'available'.

I developed a 'transport' for Mulesoft, that would allow XMPP based communication, and relay that to my phone either by sms or email, and vice versa. At the time the communication were Jabber based and almost everything was through that, so this worked out quite nicely.

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

#526

Post by l2silver »

johnboiles wrote: post #520

My wife and I lived on a Sailboat for a few years. The boat had a 20 year old SeaTalk bus connected to the sensors (depth, wind speed/direction, water speed). I bought a newer radio with an AIS receiver. Of course I wanted to hook it all to my computer & phone. So I built some hardware to interface with the SeaTalk network, the AIS radio (and a modern GPS) https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-hardware https://github.co…

I'm always impressed by hardware hacks.

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

#527

Post by l2silver »

patcon wrote: post #270

I co-organized a weekly hacknight meetup of 40-70 people. I wrote a script to make Anki spaced repetition flash card decks with avatars and names pulled from the meetup API. I would use GitHub Actions to run the script a few hours before the event, then drop the importable deck into a Google Drive folder. I'd review the deck before the meetup, and then at the event, I'd not stress about names. I'd pretend to introduc…

Yes Anki. I've also written my own code to convert markdown and yaml files into anki cards. So amazing.

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

#528

Post by adityapurwa »

I built https://playtune.app to have rhythm game with unlimited musics because it uses YouTube as the music playback provider. I play it often with my daughter.

I consider removing the restart feature (or maybe just for her) because she kept restarting whenever she missed just a single note

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

#529

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

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 this is cool as hell!!
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