Ask HN: What are you currently building? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#51

Post by benjamincburns » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:53 PM UTC

What did I start? An autonomous lawn mower. My goal is to get it done for under $1,000 USD using mostly snap-together hardware. My timeline is to have it mowing via RC by the end of January (shipping to New Zealand takes a while, especially when you're on a budget), while I'd like it to be capable of safely mowing autonomously by July or so - though I'm optimistic that it'll reach good-enough stage by March. I'll publish the build log on my website [1] as I hit major milestones.

What did I finish? I've been rebuilding my larger quadcopter and I finally got it up in the air and it flies well enough for my needs, though admittedly I did trim my friend's tree with it a bit. I'm chalking that up to pilot error, however. I hadn't flown anything in a few months and it turns out that line-of-sight orientation on quadrotors isn't just like riding a bicycle. It could still use a bit of tuning -- projects like those are never really finished.

I also have a few fairly interesting/exciting projects which I desperately need to write up. One such example is a wide field-of-view stereo head-mounted display for FPV flying which can be built in an evening for under $200 USD. Another is my as-of-yet fruitless efforts to build a very low latency HD digital video transmission system - also for FPV flying. If these are projects which you'd find useful, or which you'd simply like to read more about - leave me a comment or flick me an e-mail [2]. Encouragement always helps when it comes to getting things written up.

1: http://www.benjamincburns.com/

2: My username at gmail.

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#52

Post by tunesmith » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

I'm playing around with some of the various ways that dot/graphviz-like functionality is workable (for some level of "workable") on javascript. Currently fiddling with dagre-d3 and angular.

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#53

Post by mike-cardwell » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

jashper wrote: post #17

A private messaging webapp that uses webrtc p2p connections and onion routing amongst facebook friend circles

Is any of this publicly accessible? Links?

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#54

Post by benjamincburns » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:00 PM UTC

wicker wrote: post #22

It's been a really fun break! I'm getting interested in super low frequency signals so I looked up the E202 Very Low Frequency ( I think it would be awesome to go find a pipeline to use as an antenna... Next project is to take my BlueROV[3] and build a hydrophone array[4] for it so a friend and I can see if a underwater acoustics engineer friend and I can use it to track other objects (like a remote-controlled toy bo…

FWIW, you may wish to add a 50Hz notch filter as well. If you're in North America 50Hz noise won't be as much of an issue, but if your receiver is sensitive enough there's likely still enough of it floating around from various DC-AC inverters and the like. Of course, if you've got a good enough tuner you can likely just measure the noise in that "band" yourself.

Re: using a pipeline as an antenna - I wonder how difficult (or illegal) it would be to use mains power lines. My RF-foo is only marginally above white-belt, but I'd imagine that a fair amount of low frequency signal would make it through the transformers.

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#55

Post by makaimc » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

There's nothing like big blocks of time to get some writing and coding done. Full Stack Python (https://www.fullstackpython.com) got some major updates with new pages, additional sections on current pages and new links to resources. The change log [1] and commit log [2] capture what's new.

[1] http://www.fullstackpython.com/change-log.html [2] https://github.com/makaimc/fullstackpython.com/commits/gh-pa...

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#56

Post by waigani » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC

Over Christmas I open sourced Lingo. A tool to manage code quality at scale. Here's the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832511

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#57

Post by olegious » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:04 PM UTC

ironrabbit wrote: post #14

Playing around with neural networks to try to salvage my fantasy hockey season.

What exactly are you doing? I've been gathering data for few seasons in my league, going to use it to help me draft next year.

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#58

Post by jacques_chester » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:04 PM UTC

Robojar.

A microsubscription (cf. Spotify, Google Contributor, Apple Music etc) system that works on the open web while remaining robust to attempts to siphon payments through fake visits.

As is typical of an engineer, I spend entirely too much time running down technical rabbit holes. Thanks a lot, ADHD. My current rabbit hole is getting everything into Concourse CI.

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#59

Post by benjamincburns » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

jaisonjustus wrote: post #15

We're currently building a desktop based time tracking application for ourselves, later we will release to everyone. Our main goal is to bring us back on track on our personal projects. Also billing solution for our consulting work.

Out of curiosity, have you seen Toggl? We use it at work for time tracking and find it mostly quite good. Would be curious to know what's different about your use case.

Re: Ask HN: What are you currently building?

#60

Post by kaolinite » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

For the past month or so I've been building a notes app as I wanted to move away from Evernote and couldn't find a good replacement. It has been really fun building something that I use every day and building it exactly as I want to use it.

http://github.com/timdavies/trunk