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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?

#971

Post by ornornor »

troebr wrote: post #28

I bought one of these LED screens (you get 64*32px, so not a lot!), and I wrote an app to view my local surf conditions on it (so I know what I'm missing out on while working). But because it doesn't support a way to run local apps that fetch from APIs, I had to add a way to show the forecast for other spots and make it "official". No idea how many people use it, but I saw it on instagram ads so that was some kind of…

> But because it doesn't support a way to run local apps that fetch from APIs, I had to add a way to show the forecast for other spots and make it "official".

I’m having difficulty parsing and understanding this sentence: how did this result in your display being posted on instagram without your knowing?

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

#972

Post by wingtw »

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…

Ive had an idea for a flight sim station for a while, but its no where near diy'able am afraid - to be able to 'mimic' different g forces, im thinking a big 'arm' rotating (like the one soviet cosmonauts and i think fighter pilots were trained on), with a capsule in the end of the arm containing a cage with a chair, rotatable 360 deg, with a screen - so if you need sode Gs, youd just rotate the cage so that your side is facing outwards...dunno about the doability at all :D

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

#973

Post by r0rshrk »

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…

Are you willing to share the source code? I wanna do this for London

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

#974

Post by AlexVN »

I came up with a lot of small custom algorithms for my thesis, all based on np.einsum. I had to estimate the assymptotic complexity for them, and every time I would get a different answer than the last. So at some point I built a system to which you give an einsum expression and a mapping between axis and their names and you get the assymptotic complexity (e.g. for MxN times NxM matrix multiplication 'ij,jk->ik' you would use {'i': 'M', 'j': 'N', 'k': 'M'} to get O(M^2 N) complexity). It also supports chains of einsum expressions, summing the complexities together and symbolically simplifying. And it uses opt_einsum to reorder the operations to get the best possible asymptotics for an expression.

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

#976

Post by lacrosse_tannin »

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.…

I just give out the real code

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

#977

Post by natewaddoups »

Around 2001-2002 I wanted to build a bipedal robot, about 1-2 feet tall, mostly using RC servos... But first I wanted to sort of prototype it in software, and that part of the project took on a life of its own.

Coincidentally, a library called ODE had just been released, which did (still does) very nice physics modeling. After a year I had a sort of "robot construction kit" / 3D world editor and simulator GUI for ODE. I had so much fun building that app, and building random stuff in that virtual world, I didn't even start on the physical robot. Bipeds, centipedes (there's a dialog box to build N-pedes), snakes, a motorcycle, a couple cars, etc, etc.

If anyone remembers sodaplay from back in the day, I cloned and extended their GUI for controlling simple oscillating motions. And added a smooth waveform for "up, pause, down, pause, repeat" in addition to just sine waves.

There's a simple visual programming language for configuring the data flow from those simple wave functions to motorized joints in your contraption.

There's multilevel undo/redo for everything, because I had just bought the GoF patterns book, and the CommandHistory chapter seemed like such a great idea that I couldn't NOT use it.

It turned out really nice, I was super proud for a while... life moved on.

I dusted it off a couple years ago and got it to build with a modern version of Visual Studio. The C++ standard has evolved, and there are now a billion warnings, but it does build and run. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get the MPEG library and terrain library to work. And the screenshots and MPEGs from 2002 are long lost, so I haven't got much to show for it today.

But it is on GitHub if anyone wants to play with it: https://github.com/natewaddoups/juice

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

#978

Post by clbrmbr »

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 think there is a lot of value in what you describe. But it’s hard to build a UI for, and hard to market AFAICT. [im thinking of a more generalized HVAC AI product.]

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

#980

Post by grandiego »

bussyfumes wrote: post #313

When I was a student there was this power-of-two game on my friend's iPhone that I was literally addicted to. I didn't have an iPhone and eventually the game even disappeared from the AppStore. I missed it very much and my friends jokingly mentioned building a copy just for me. They never got around to it but at some point I thought "maybe I should give it a try?". So I gave it a try with no game dev knowledge and th…

Hey man, I was yesterday until 3am w/your game and one hour today morning (had to stop to resume my life:) So addictive!
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