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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?

#151

Post by BrandoElFollito »

stevekemp wrote: post #50
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...

I did a similar thing, via an esp8266 device and a vibration sensor! I also automated the display of tram-departures from the tram-stop next to my house with similar hardware. Otherwise I setup some "wireless buttons" to trigger alerts/actions on my Linux desktop system, and record local temperature/humidity into a time-series database for tracking purposes.

Which buttons did you use?

I was wondering about that as well but I only found the Amazon ones, which either need tricky operations to be usable (the brand-oriented dash ones) or expensive (the Amazon IoT (eom dash button) for 25 eur).

Surprisingly I did not find one on AliExpress

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

#152

Post by mdorazio »

tgb wrote: post #105
roryisok wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My machine has a time remaining feature which is great in theory but it's completely inaccurate. It might tell you there's 45 minutes left in a cycle, you'll come back an hour later and it'll say 17 minutes. I guess I know where the windows file-copy dialog author went to work after Microsoft

I think modern washers weigh the clothes and change their cycles based off that and other information. Mine is similar but seems to always overestimate the time instead, which is probably the better failure state.

From what I understand, it has to do with 1) the time displayed is for an "optimal" load (not too full, normal soilage, balanced, etc.) instead of the actual load, and 2) the machines may pause and restart or lengthen parts of the cycle if the weight and/or balance are slightly off.

In any case, the washers at my apartment complex are always off, but it's at least consistent so that I can add about 6 minutes to whatever it shows at the beginning and plan around that.

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

#153

Post by BrandoElFollito »

spuz wrote: post #16
mixedbit wrote: post #7

My WiFi router is turned off automatically at 9PM. No fancy electronics is needed for this, just something like: https://www.lazada.com.ph/products/24-hours-auto-switch-off-...

Yes, same here except it turns off at quarter past midnight. I reprogrammed a Sonoff switch so that when it turns the main router off it turns on a wifi hotspot which allows me to turn the switch on again - but only for an extra 15 or 30 minutes. In terms of stopping me wasting time on the internet until late at night while still allowing access if I really need it, it seems to work well: https://github.com/alexspurl…

I use a Sonoff to reboot my internet box if it lost internet access, currently via an external script which sends events to MQTT.

I have a vague plan to extend Espurna to have it built in.

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

#154

Post by t0mek »

amelius wrote: post #126
t0mek wrote: post #23

I used DSP to recognize the commercials in the radio broadcast on my stereo receiver and turn down the volume automatically ("adblock for the radio broadcast"). I described it here: http://blog.rekawek.eu/2016/02/24/radio-adblock/

> The commercial block starts and finishes with a jingle, so the potential software should recognize these specific sounds and turn off the volume between them. I suppose that many stations don't have such markers though.

Indeed. I see two options here.

First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky.

The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database.

On the other hand, the described project only scratches my own itch. I wouldn't try to productise an app that takes away the main source of income for the radio stations.

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

#155

Post by andai »

Immortalin wrote: post #2

Reading ebooks. https://Auditus.cc

Ahh! The centraaal station! :)

I'd love to have a service like this with wavenet-quality TTS. These are a bit jarring. Although, like low quality audio files, I guess you get used to it pretty quick?

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

#156

Post by BrandoElFollito »

dancek wrote: post #19

Screen scraping photos of my kids from a kindergarten website. Recognizing good photos that feature my kids and deleting everything else is manual, though. Alerts to my phone if the fridge or freezer temperature exceeds a limit or the humidity under my dishwasher starts rising. Granted, neither are fully automatic and require manual intervention.

Did you build the IoT devices yourself or used an off the shelf solution?

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

#157

Post by paultopia »

billsmithaustin wrote: post #107

My son used to ask me every morning whether to wear warm-weather clothes or cool-weather clothes, so I wrote a app that scraped some weather data and served it up in a web page as a temperature graph, along with a recommendation for what kind of clothes to wear.

You must live in the Midwest? Or somewhere else where seasons change on a daily basis.

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

#159

Post by nghiatran_feels »

I fall in love with the 18th art. Everyday, I spent around 15 mints to open and see what news from Google Art and Culture and WikiArt.

Until, one day, I'm so lazy to do it, and write the macOS app to fetch feature art and set it as a wallpaper on my personal laptop daily.

It's my rescuer.

https://github.com/NghiaTranUIT/artify-macos

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