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Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#291

Post by spuz »

tga wrote: post #277
spuz wrote: post #18

I built an accelerometer-based washing machine sensor which sends a notification to my phone when the washing is done. This is useful because the machine itself has no indication when it's done: http://www.instructables.com/id/Washing-Machine-Notification...

My solution for this was an ESP8266-based Sonoff POW (wireless smart switch and power monitor), running Tasmota, sending data through MQTT to Home Assistant, scripted to send notifications through Telegram. https://www.itead.cc/sonoff-pow.html https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota https://www.home-assistant.io

Interesting, I didn't know that Sonoff did a power consumption monitor. That makes sense for something like a washing machine. Presumably though you never actually use the relay/off-switch capability of the Sonoff, right?

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#293

Post by samatman »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

I'd consider retrofitting a Kitchen-Aide or other stand mixer. The epicyclic rotation should give you pretty good dispersion.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#294

Post by Deinos »

dhumph wrote: post #261
anonymous5133 wrote: post #259

I have a robot lawn mower that is wire guided. Instead of the traditional lawn mowers that basically cut the grass in all directions (making a sloppy cut pattern) my mower knows how to cut in straight lines so you get a traditional cut pattern. It also has the ability to dump the grass cuttings into a composting bin. Basically, I put down wire guide cable into the lawn and into the cement as well. It is all powered b…

Do you have any information that would allow some to build something similar? Would love to see the setup!

I would also love to see a blog post on this!

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#295

Post by claydavisss »

hajrice wrote: post #272
hajrice wrote: post #211

I automated my Investment Portfolio. My investment thesis is to buy high-growth tech company stocks with an upcoming earnings call in the next 90 days. I have a script that scrapes Yahoo finance and tells me which stocks to buy. Surprisingly it's worked well, and I've gotten a return of 44% last year

To clarify: I still have to execute the orders to buy and sell, but the thinking for when to buy and what to buy is automated. I just sell after the earnings or when I gain the desired amount (5-10% return)

Aren't you at all interested in managing your capital gains exposure? Short term trades tend to play to the advantage of the broker (fees) and tax collector (short term cap gains tax)

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#296

Post by Herodotus38 »

pimeys wrote: post #108

I've automated almost all of my diabetes management into a level I basically can look into graphs and decide the level I want my glucose to go. For glucose monitoring I use Dexcom G5 sensors[0] and xDrip[1] open source monitoring application for Android. Insulin delivery is handled by a Accu-Chek Spirit Combo[2] pump, that is one of the rare pumps with a Bluetooth connection. The entity deciding the basal rates and c…

Assuming you are type I, I found this paper today which you might find interesting.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-018-0062-8

My little sister is type I and using the BCG vaccine in this way blows my mind.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#297

Post by delbel »

A_Person wrote: post #170

Ok, I'll bite! About 20 years ago I inherited enough money to retire on for the rest of my life. But the only evidence of those assets was, a dot matrix printout that anyone could have done in five minutes. So over the next few weeks, I created accounts in the various share registries and online banking websites, and manually cross-checked the printed list against those accounts. All was good, but I wanted to do that…

If you wanted to re-write that for Chrome or whatever (including headless) I would suggest Selenium or WebDriver suite, including PhantomJS. However, my knowledge (expert level at the time) is a bit outdated and there are probably new toolkits based on the Selenium/WebDriver protocol, it is a good direction to point you to.

I have had my bank remove records from my online account, or not have the ledger balance add up, so your idea interest me. I contacted the controller of the currency about my bank messing with my records, and they did absolutely nothing.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#298

Post by narrator »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

I did this with the healthiest packaged food I could get on Amazon (quest makes pretty good stuff) and doing subscribe and save to get a 15% discount + 5% cash back on the Amazon visa card. It comes every month and I just eat all that.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#299

Post by ryanjshaw »

[deleted] wrote: post #184
YaxelPerez wrote: post #119

I used Tasker to make my phone vibrate in Morse code. Now I don't have to take it out of my pocket to read a notification.

[deleted]

You led me down a rabbit hole, as I was trying to understand your 'wpm' variable... In case anybody else is interested, he's using 12wpm apparently based on formula [1], which isn't enough for a Radiotelegraph Operator License but still impressive to me :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#Speed_in_words_per_...

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#300

Post by mkl »

mehrdadn wrote: post #48
petters wrote: post #44

Parsing my monthly credit card bill (PDF), categorizing, and displaying statistics.

Ooh, I've been looking for something like this. Could I ask how you parse your bills? Did you just hack together your own script or did you find a parser online? I tried doing this several times but it seems rather painful to get right since the formats can differ and since copying text from PDFs can sometimes ignore the table layouts and whatnot.

There are no general solutions, unfortunately. Every PDF-generating system will do things differently, so parsing them must be custom for each type. Generated PDFs are usually very systematic, though, and PDF commands are text (compressed). You can uncompress with PDFTK:

  pdftk input.pdf output output.pdf uncompress
Then try grepping or using whatever tools you like (there will be binary parts of the file still, like embedded fonts and bitmaps).
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