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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?

#611

Post by Suppafly »

codpiece wrote: post #516

Not sure if it counts as tech, but I created a voiceboard for my mother to help her communicate while in hospice. She had a massive stroke and could no longer speak. I thought of a tablet app, but the stakes were too high, so it wound up as a laminated paper. You can read about my design decisions here: https://voiceboard.org

They make something like that for autistic people and others that are non-verbal. The commercial product, which is essentially just a binder with printed words or pictures, is surprisingly expensive so lots of people DIY them.

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

#612

Post by lurker919 »

drcode wrote: post #593

I just moved to the bay area. I made an app that scrapes all bay area events from meetup, eventbrite, and a couple of other sites- This way you end up with around 100 events a day, way too much to read through. So next I take each event, send it to chatgpt3.5 and ask it to rate this event on around 20 parameters. Next, I take the latitude/longitude of each event and measure driving distance from my house. Then I have…

Please opensource this - or even a pastebin would work.

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

#613

Post by ant6n »

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.

Very neat. What are those power cars (triebkopf)? I thought sbb was only using proper locomotives (cabs at both ends) and EMUs (kiss, twindexx, …).

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

#615

Post by pugworthy »

I have been working for a while on a wooden sailing ship model, where at times one will reference model parts in terms of real dimensions - e.g., a 4" x 18" piece of wood. But that has to be translated into the model's scale when measuring the model parts.

To streamline this, I made a little Arduino-driven device with an OLED display that can plug into the digital output port that many digital micrometers have. It takes the current micrometer measurement, applies the scaling factor, and displays the scaled dimension on the OLED.

So that means I can take a small piece of wood from the kit, measure it with the micrometer, and directly see its full scale dimension - e.g., it's a scale 8" thick plank. Or I can take the micrometer to the 8 foot measure, and use it to mark off a piece of wood that I want to be that long.

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

#616

Post by nielsole »

At the beginning of COVID i switched to weekly shopping and realized that it takes a significant time to inventarize the storage to make sure I make it through the week.

I built a storage shelf that self-inventorizes based on strain gauges. Through the change in weight distribution it can determine the weight and 2D location of the item added or removed. LED strips give immediate feedback. https://www.niels-ole.com/arduino/iot/2021/03/21/storage-sys...

I used this to automatically add the items consumed throughout the week to my shopping list.

I only ever built a single shelf board (subsequent boards had issues) and I never fully implemented the advanced usability features of adding new items for the first time and automatically determining good places for them, but it was a very fun project.

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

#617

Post by d136o »

jwr wrote: post #472

Oh, 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…

Love this.

Semi relatedly, the reason I chose my current smart watch is that it can go weeks without charging, I simply don’t worry about it. Yes it has a limited number of colors and I can’t browse the web on it or w.e. but that’s a feature.

Maybe I’ll seek out a phone with similar battery use profile…

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

#619

Post by sidwyn »

Built a Chrome extension to save myself money last Christmas: https://getscore.app/chrome?ref=hn.

Ended up saving thousands of dollars for myself so far (I shop a lot online), and friends & family really love the product. We also applied to YC – so let's see how that goes!

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

#620

Post by sjg1729 »

paws wrote: post #71

I don't know if it qualifies as the "most interesting" but as a travel bug I wrote a little airfare scraper that I got plenty of value out of. Basically it's a script that scrapes several places for flight deals and "mistake fares" and notifies my phone if it matches with my city. No searching like other flight apps, you basically just set it up and wait, and various places will pop up. Helps if you're in a hub city…

Been traveling a lot this year - this would've saved me a ton of money. If you've still got the script lying around, I'd love to check it out
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