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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?

#951

Post by thih9 »

mariusvaporware wrote: post #413

A software developer and football (soccer) fan who lives in an antipodean time zone, I enjoy watching games on demand the morning after they occur. Apart from watching the games of the team I support, I like to watch one or two of the most entertaining games in any given week, but score spoilers absolutely ruin the experience for me. So, I created https://laterball.com : a web app the algorithmically determines the b…

Is it fun to watch only high quality games?

Won’t the high quality become the norm after some time?

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

#956

Post by ThomasMidgley »

About 15 years ago we had our first chickens. Due to space and time constraints, we did not build a new chicken house, but bought an old children's playhouse on stilts. The chickens should get an automatic chicken flap. But unfortunately, at that time all purchasable automatic chicken flaps worked on the principle of a winch and the flap had to go up vertically. With our chicken house, however, only a horizontally opening flap would have worked. So I built an automatic chicken flap from parts of an old inkjet printer, two limit switches and an Arduino. It has worked flawlessly for many years. Another advantage was: my control opened in the morning at 8 o'clock and closed in the evening depending on the calculated sunset (+ 30 min). Such ingenious control I have not seen in any automatic chicken flap until today. All automatic chicken flaps that can be purchased in Germany today work either with a timer or with a brightness sensor. And then either in the morning and evening only by time or brightness as trigger. Time combined with brightness can none. And the brightness sensors usually have the disadvantage that the flap opens if you shine at night longer than 1 min on the sensor, for example with the flashlight, if you work something next to the chicken house.

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

#957

Post by getcrunk »

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…

Can you share the promo you give to gpt?

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

#958

Post by elektrontamer »

mltony wrote: post #714

Blind developer here; I often write tools for myself to perform some task that is not well supported by my screenreader. For example: * 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 comm…

This is one of the coolest things I've ever read. If you don't mind me asking, I'm really interested in how you read, write and edit code. What tools do you use? What's your typical workflow like?

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

#959

Post by aftbit »

altered_state wrote: post #814

In my new house with underfloor heating, an air source heat pump was installed that turned out to have a controller that switches it on and off over 80 times per day which reduces its lifespan significantly. I decided to see if I could improve on this so I started reading lots of papers regarding temperature control. Since this is a tricky problem to solve, I built a quick fix solution while I work on the "real" vers…

I noticed the same problem with my heat pump. It was cycling every 5 minutes when we first moved in. I replaced the thermostat with one that supports Zigbee, with plans to drive the setpoint up and down using a second level controller in order to reduce this behavior.

Actually, the new thermostat entirely solved the problem, by allowing a 2°F deadband instead of the 0.5° that the previous thermostat used. Now it will run roughly once an hour instead of ~12 times. This is not as good as your solution, but considerably better than it was.

I still use the Zigbee control to ramp the thermostat up and down at morning and night less aggressively than a native schedule on the thermostat, but it isn't truly necessary.

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

#960

Post by ismokedoinks »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #149

My 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,…

I used to work construction with one of those big old radios covered in paint that has been dropped 1000 times--we got around to using an FM transmitter dangling off the phone for it. It was fun + charming, since then I've thought about getting a big radio setup and hard-wiring Bluetooth in but your setup sounds truer to the concept.
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