Ask HN: How did you hack your home? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How did you hack your home?

#11

Post by quickthrower2 » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

I got a sheet of tarp* under the verandah to prevent water leaking through to the garage.

Pulled off the door handles that were broken. Gone handleless - you have to stick your hand under the gap at the bottom to open if it is too stuck.

Covered the couch in plastic liner to prevent spills.

Used a spare council collection bin as a compost heap.

*As in Tarpaulin, not a bailout. This one prevents a literal bailout.

Re: Ask HN: How did you hack your home?

#12

Post by bryan11 » Sun, Feb 25, 2018, 10:39 PM UTC

Added waterproof liner under kitchen and bathroom sinks so water leaks don't damage cabinets. Also added battery powered water leak alarms.

Got tired of carrying laundry downstairs, so I changed one bathroom cabinet drawer into a laundry chute.

Re: Ask HN: How did you hack your home?

#13

Post by hemantv » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 4:09 AM UTC

Maybe not something I made explicitly. But here are few things 1. A keyless lock. 2. Automatic garage door opener 3. An occupancy sensor in my work with timer of 20 minutes 4. Google home for everything else.

Re: Ask HN: How did you hack your home?

#14

Post by wowca » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:02 PM UTC

Created an automated chicken coop door which opens/closes the door based on sunlight.

It consists of:

  1. Chicken coop  
  2. Old wiper motor to drive the door up/down (the door is suspended on fishing line)  
  3. Arduino Nano  
  4. Motor control shield  
  5. Light sensor  
  6. 2 mechanical switches for the door positions (stop the motor if switch is pressed)  
  7. Old car battery  
  8. 3 chinese 12V 15W solar panels

Re: Ask HN: How did you hack your home?

#15

Post by jxub » Mon, Feb 26, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #10

jxub wrote: post #6

Divorced my wife. After that, my Arduino experiments feel pretty limited in impact on my household.

The title says "hack" not "lose"

She's a lawyer so I got a decent alimony tho

Re: Ask HN: How did you hack your home?

#16

Post by pixelfeeder » Tue, Feb 27, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

TDettmering wrote: post #3

In the pre-Smartphone era (not really, but I didn't buy one back then), I built a printer that would output a daily report every morning that I could just take with me: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sfg/albums/72157623026358605 I used an old POS printer from eBay and an Arduino with an Ethernet shield. It was a fun thing, but was made obsolete by smartphones.

This is so cool