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

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651–660 of 749 posts

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

#651
post #603

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly i…

Would be cool if you open sourced it, I would happily add my NLP expertise to it as I have the same issues.

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

#652
We bought a house a couple years ago where all the closets were totally empty, not even a single basic rod. I wrote an app that allowed me to design my closets and it would spit out exactly what to buy from Elfa. This enabled us to save a lot of money over choosing a preconfigured Elfa package.

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

#654
post #205

When the dog used to wake me up in the middle of the night to drink water and take him out, I had to do to it manually. Now it’s all automated, my body just does it. 90% of brain is asleep. I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.

How old is your dog? After 5-6 months they should not need to go out in the night. Either you need to train them not to or take them the vet to check if they have bladder problems

Some dogs just like to go out and be outside. My dog likes to go out and just stand in the middle of the yard for an hour at 2am. Her mom is the same way.

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

#655

I've fully automated my supply of fresh local coffee beans using a connected scale. I leave my beans on the scale and the data is sent to a ML system that learns from my consumption and reorders for me so new beans arrive at the right time. (I'm a beta tester here: https://www.getbottomless.com )

Neat. Can you suggest a good scale with an API (or other data stream)?

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

#656

Turning on/off outdoor lighting as sunrise / sunset changes over the year. Raspberry Pi runs a program that gets sunrise sunset data for my lat long, and then turns on off lights depending on that data plus preferences about when the earliest I'd expect someone to be leaving/coming. Used to have a little timer that plugged into the outlet, but you'd keep having to update the on-off times as the seasons changed, and t…

What exactly does the RPi control? Is it some sort of WiFi or programmable outlet? I've wanted to do this, but wasn't sure how to get the RPi to control the lights.

My mechanical timers have all broken or drifted too.

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

#657

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…

Please do a writeup on this! One of the reasons I've been dragging my feet on home ownership is I'm not a fan of lawn mowing. Now if only you could also automate shoveling/snowblowing.

Husqvarna has a pretty excellent roomba-for-your-yard system. 100% autonomous. It's somewhat expensive, but if that's the only thing that's holding up a home purchase for you, it might be worth at least looking at. Alternatively, you can probably whip something up with some kind of frankenstein assembly of an electric wheelchair base, an electric lawnmower, a Raspberry Pi, and a camera.

https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/

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

#660
post #607
post #603

I'm 25, and single. I'm very social, and I work out regularly. But I find it hard to approach women in the street, and I've always detested loud pubs (My hearing is slightly impaired, which makes it hard for me to communicate in such a place). So I've decided to sign in to OKCupid. I've always heard the dating scene in this site is toxic, but I've had no idea. I've too many toxic and horrible things written plainly i…

That moment when you need to fix a product before you can get a date! Anyways is it open source :D

Online dating systems aren't really optimized for much of anyone, sadly. They tend to be balanced between optimums for different user demos.
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