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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?

#771

Post by rootw0rm »

12 years ago my wife had 4 strokes, barely lived, was in a coma, etc.

After lots of rehab she came home, but was paralyzed on left side, couldn't speak, couldn't hold a pen to write. Our communication technique was having her point to letters or phrases on a piece of paper.

I wrote a typing program back then that would accept as input any USB joystick for selecting letters/phrases and then text to speech on button press. Not terribly complicated, but also better than anything I could find at the time.

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

#773

Post by DanHulton »

modeless wrote: post #69

My townhome complex had one of those call boxes at the front gate. When Doordash/FedEx/the cleaners/the in-laws/etc arrived they would have to call me from the call box and I'd have to answer it and listen to garbled audio to figure out who it was and press 9 to open the gate. It was kind of a pain, so I made a Twilio app to answer calls from the call box. I set up custom entry codes that I could hand out to anyone.…

Hah, I also built this for myself, and also considering productizing it, except I realized that there's absolutely no way I want to be responsible for the situation where my service is down and people cannot get into their houses.

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

#774

Post by crote »

niccl wrote: post #80

Not sure if this counts: A lighting desk for my hobby of lighting live music. For reasons I like doing live control along with the music (known as busking). Existing things are either limited and can't control moving lights, or don't have the flexibility to busk the way I want. so, having worked a long time ago for a crowd that built what were at the time the best lighting desks in the world, I built my own It has 36…

Where did you get 36 motorized faders without going bankrupt? Even AliExpress ones are $15/each or more!

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

#775

Post by matheusmoreira »

pigcat wrote: post #760

My grandmother has dementia. About twice a day, she calls my parents every 5 minutes, forgetting that she just hung up. The calls are always the same: "You live there now. Yes you have money. We came to visit you yesterday." This can go on for an hour or so. My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they'll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the…

Incredible use of technology! Caregiver overload is so common.

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

#777

Post by feifan »

I'm working on an app to browse a codebase as a list of constructs — classes, methods, etc. It matches how I think about code: as a database of named entities, in which the implementation is often an afterthought — unlike text editors, in which constructs of various types, along with their implementation, all kind of look the same. It's still a very early project, but here's a short recording of some of what I've built so far[^0]. It's been a great way to learn SwiftUI, the Language Server Protocol, and FSEvents as well!

[^0]: https://twitter.com/tanagram_/status/1652164856563507200

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

#778

Post by joshu »

RowanH wrote: post #255

The 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…

The only simulator I’ve ever been able to drive in was one with air bladders in the harness that applied pressure backwards. I would love to get one, but it was quite pricey.

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

#779

Post by inezk »

pigcat wrote: post #760

My grandmother has dementia. About twice a day, she calls my parents every 5 minutes, forgetting that she just hung up. The calls are always the same: "You live there now. Yes you have money. We came to visit you yesterday." This can go on for an hour or so. My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they'll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the…

This is beautiful, I wonder if there is a way to make it avaliable to more people. Not even as a business - I just imagine it would help a lot of families in similar situations.
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