I created an IOT 3d printed, Raspberry Pi Pico powered WIFI fish feeder with a rotating dispensing carousel with an 8 food pellet capacity. I could have made it higher capacity but NJ is a restricted state (gun joke). I plan on improving it by adding battery backup and an RTC, so I can travel and be sure that my fish still get fed in case of a power outage.
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#572I made a wagon with an electric motor to carry my things to the park and at music festivals. It has a 1000W brushless DC motor and a drive train for a go cart. It’s controlled by an ESP32 that is attached to a hand throttle on the handle for the wagon. This ESP32 also has a temperature sensor attached to the batteries in the wagon to make sure they don’t overheat. It controls a relay that powers another ESP32 that controls the Neopixels I’ve attached to the wagon using LED channels with a milky white diffuser.
It was a very fun project and I learned a lot about electricity, batteries and the pitfalls of aliexpress.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#573The G-Seat as part of my sim-rig. 9 AC Servos, borderline dangerous, beast of a simulator. The G-Seat I decided to do better than commercial offerings (had tried "the best" and it was pretty average). CNC brake folded aluminium seat with moveable flaps controlled by AC Servos - had to 'de tune' as they were literally at rib-breaking speed initially. About a year worth of development designed and prototype in Fusion 3…
This is awesome. I've wanted to go down this route for a while. Every time, I basically give up at the point where I decide I want to check out https://opensfx.com and then realize I don't have an easy way to get a referral.
I'm currently using a NLR Wheel Stand, and probably don't have time to build right now, but if you'd consider shooting me an email at chris at cjkinni.com I'd love a chance at actually going down the route of building one of these. No worries if you'd prefer not to.
Great work on the whole thing!
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#574Re-implemnted a version of the old unix `who`, `last`, and `finger` command line tools that works across most of the whole infra of the company I work for. Planning to add more APIs for it for different systems to aggregate up into it. (AD, EDRs, Splunk, etc.)
I was a sysadmin for a dialup ISPs with a shell server in the mid 90's and people today have no idea how good we had it back then. An entire userbase accessible from a single shell prompt and a few commands instead of todays gamified web UXs with 3D graphics. Security was terrible back then, but the UX was calm, so I re-built that experience over everything.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#575I built a Chess training app called SpicyChess(https://spicychess.com) that leverages spaced repetition and strict time constraint to increase your pattern recognition ability for tactical motifs. SpicyChess also allows you to "bookmark" a puzzle for review later on.
It's not the most interesting tech I built but it's the most recent one and checks the features wish-list I've had when using other tactics training apps.
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#576I made a shell script that can be used to generate a diff of what data was modified in your pg database between two points in time. I use it to help me get a quick sense of what certain actions do without having to dive into the code too deeply. It's a pretty simple thing, but has been valuable to me quite a bit. https://github.com/denvaar/pgdiff
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#577I'm slightly embarrassed that in terms of building personally relevant things, my proudest (digital) work is always shell scripts I use daily. Most of my personal projects are non-technical meat-space things like building with wood and the like. Here's some that I've open-sourced:
- A git interface using fzf that works pretty nicely and is very composable. https://github.com/bigH/git-fuzzy
- An interactive evaluator, perfect for interactive `sed`, `grep`, `jq`, etc. If properly configured, it'll keep history per command or using whatever key you give it. I find myself using it often with `jq`. https://github.com/bigH/interactively
There are many other shell functions/scripts that are interesting from my `dotfiles`. Particularly interesting snippets for anyone who wants them:
- A recursize `which` that follows symlinks and stops at a real file. https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...
- A `watch` alternative that runs in the current shell. https://github.com/bigH/dotfiles/blob/3d48792b4e910d2fc82504...
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#578A tool called "diff modulo base": https://git.sr.ht/~nhaehnle/diff-modulo-base Given two version (old and new) of a Git change (i.e., individual commit or patch series from a pull request) it produces a diff that is actually useful for reviewing purposes, assuming you've already reviewed the old version of the change. It's sort of like `git range-diff`, but where `git range-diff` produces a "diff of diffs" that is ve…
I'm the author of DiffLens (https://www.difflens.com/). I initially built it for myself too (and use it everyday) and it's currently free for anyone to try. It's an attempt to use abstract syntax trees to make diffs more readable. Happy to see another diff project here!
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#579Smart RSS reader that, right now, ingests about 1000 articles a day and picks out 300 for me to skim. Since I helped write this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0312018 I was always asking "Why is RSS failing? Why do failing RSS readers keep using the same failing interface that keeps failing?" and thought that text classification was ready in 2004 for content-based recommendation, then I wrote https://ontology2.com/es…
Cool!
I've been hacking on a related side project -- in my case, I wanted something like this but for Twitter. Right now it's using gpt-3.5-turbo to cluster related Tweets & rank based on my interests.
Source is here: https://github.com/kasrak/feedpaper
Re: Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
#580I started building a typing web app to get better at touch typing. (Doesn’t work on mobile so open on PC if curious)
Still very early stage and many more features (racing, user management, etc) coming but it’s probably one of the first projects I’ve built that I’ve actually used