I used a Raspberry Pi with a Hifi-berry card to make a web-controlled MP3 player hooked up to my stereo. It's a fairly bare-bones app but I wrote it myself (Flask, VLC) and it works great!
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#562Oh, I think I have a good one. I had an HP-25 calculator as old as myself, and couldn't use it. The original battery pack contained two sealed NiCd cells, which obviously failed many years ago. Most people replaced their NiCd cells with new ones, then with NiMh cells, or even alkaline AA batteries. This was always problematic: newer batteries were slightly larger and never fit well. Also, the power consumption of a c…
I love this. I used to have a bunch of things that would benefit from a project like this.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#563I 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 love this so much. Amazing use of creativity and tech chops. A++ would trainspot again.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#564Currently working on building a virtual art gallery populated with fictitious works from dead artists generated by Stable Diffusion. Users in the same room can talk to each other using WebRTC.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#565I 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.
Very cool, how does the stitching work?
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#566I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up local video content to a schedule I create. The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an…
That’s great! Like the idea of bringing serendipitous timing back. I see ‘Sounder’ is coming up, I recently got that soundtrack on vinyl!
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#567My 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,…
Earth Angel, will you be mine…
How about a speech synthesis DJ, “that was Foo McBar from 19XX”?
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#568It's not specifically just for me but for my team at the World Largest Trivia Contest [0]. It's a 54 hour long contest, questions are broadcast over the radio, you have the length of 2 songs to call in the answers, and you can use any source to find the answer. Sounds easy, right? Just Google it? Nope. "In a big screen flick, XYZ is talking to ABC about something. In the background, a train passes. What does it say on the train?"
This has led to a ton of fun little coding projects to help us answer questions better. A lot of very hard to Google questions involve album covers, so I ran every album cover I could get through Google Vision and built a little search engine. Another part of the contest is short (1-2s) clips of songs being broadcast and you have a few hours to come up with what they are. We built a massive fingerprint library ahead of time and used it to answer some of those (Google finally got better at this too, before we built this, it'd never work because the clip was so short). We also use AWS to live transcribe the broadcast because one of the hardest parts was remembering "were they asking for the actor? their character? the movie?" and having to wait until they ask the question again between songs.
Next up is a parallel auto-dialer. There's only a handful of people answering phones, so actually calling in the answer can be a struggle.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#569I made a thingy that receives pictures of the earth from a geostationary satellite: https://gist.github.com/lxe/c1756ca659c3b78414149a3ea723eae2
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#570I 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 think this might be my favorite. Wonderful idea and execution!