711–720 of 1001 posts
Control your fan speed with your heartbeat. I created this while setting up a home trainer for bike training in my garage during the lockdown in 2020. One issue with home trainers, unlike biking outdoors, is that you don't get the benefit of the wind generated by your speed that cools you down. So you sweat a lot, and this creates dehydration. Not cool (pun intended). The solution is to use a fan. But when you are la…
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* I wrote an add-on that allows me to read HN comments in a structured way. A typical screenreader would present page in a linear manner, so you'd have to read all replies in order, which is quite tedious in popular posts. My add-on parses the page and identifies the level of each comment, and then I can navigate to previous/next comment at any level. So I can quickly check top-level comments and then read replies only if I'm interested.
* Another add-on makes Jupyter edit boxes to work with my screenreader. Jupyter was requiered at my company , so I either had to write that add-on or else. The way it works is that it sends Control+C Control+V keystrokes to the browser to retrieve contents and then presents them to me in an accessible window for editing. When I'm done it would Control+A Control+V new content back to edit box.
* BlindCompass - iOS app that I wrote for myself to navigate on the streets. One of the problems of blind people is that it is easy to lose the sense of heading, e.g. where is north vs South. So BlindCompass would read my heading and present it as a two-pitch sound, that allows me to deduce rough direction. It's also easy to figure out the right direction and just maintain it, so with BlindCompass I can cross large open spaces easily.
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…
So I built https://looptube.xyz It takes a YouTube ID input and allows you manipulate the video to loop and change tempo
The most interesting tech I've build for myself is boring: a writing tool I use every day for journaling: https://enso.sonnet.io With that out of the way here's some more ridiculous stuff: In 2016, I made a browser based AR party game where you'd fight kittens falling from the sky by dancing with vegetables in your hands (CMYK was easier to track using the webcam). I have some photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/g6Dp8…
I trained the raccoons that visit my house at night. I started them out getting a peanuts from a water bottle. Then I tied the bottle to a rope. Then kept raising the bottle higher. At that point, I built an automated feeder system using a linear actuator activated by pulling the rope with the bottle attached. It had LEDs that were green / red to show when the feeder would / wouldn't dispense peanuts. It was all driv…
At first I tried all kinds of methods to turn it on only when there was something interesting to avoid drowning in terabytes of data, detecting things like: cars, people, animals. I tried classical image processing methods, and tools like Motion, then tried similar image compression algs to find significant macroblocks; then I tried all types of methods in OpenCV; next came several neural nets with off-the-shelf YOLO/SSD object detection (using Google TFUs, Nvidia Jetsons), I even tried retraining the networks with my own tiny dataset.
In the end, everything sucked with too many false positives blowing up my cloud alert SMS traffic to myself. So now I just record 6 cameras nonstop to files. I don't get the benefit alerts, but nothing much happens, and if it does, I have history recorded.
It was a fun project, I tried all kinds of codecs, cameras, languages, frameworks, hardware, etc. I even started out trying to do custom battery-powered wireless device using a raw Chinese MIPI CCDs and building my own WiFI station. I spent over 3 years on it, just to end up with your basic CCTV box. But it was fun!