Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#61

Post by justinlloyd » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

jwx48 wrote: post #60

justinlloyd wrote: post #47

"Selfhosted" solutions: Retro chores: A chores list mounted to the wall. It has a 4K OLED touchscreen that is 20" tall but only 4" wide. Physical toggle switches controlled by electro magnets so that the Raspberry Pi inside can physically toggle the switches. Complete a chore? You toggle the switch. Then the Raspberry Pi, at the end of the day, resets the toggle switch and clears the chore from the list. It's made wi…

Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job. This blows my mind, and I love it. What sort of limits did you put on the Mechanical Turk service to keep people from farming…

It posted a MT task when it detected weight in the litter box that was less than a cat but more than a little pee. Very sensitive digital weight platform and some fine tuning of the heuristic to get it just right. Then the MT task had to be finished in X minutes from when they start, but the Turker could request extra time on the task. But if they didn't, it would time after N minutes. Then, if they have clicked "done", two more MT tasks would get generated for two new people, where the MT worker would be asked to look at a before and an after shot of the litter box and decide if it was clean.

I kept it online for about six months. It was obviously a "dumb idea taken to the extreme" project, which included "and what can I do with computer vision and robotics for my final project with this really expensive Fujitsu robot arm I picked up from a surplus auction?"

You may be referring to the "farming" to be first in line to get the job. I didn't really prevent anything like that. Cats poop at different times, so no real way to predict when the job would pop up on MT. The Kinect and weight sensor in combination determined there was no cat present, and then the job would post. The job would always be gone in seconds. People got very creative with their cleaning, treating it like a Zen sand garden. I would come back and see pure art at times. Once, the MTurker stacked up the excrement like they were recreating the mashed potato scene from Close Encounters. They were not invited. Much like the popular meme: "Except for Billy. Billy has created the opposite of art."

I did have the usual "if the person who cleaned it last didn't do a job that passed review, they would be barred from taking future cleaning jobs."

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#62

Post by justinlloyd » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:03 PM UTC

hacker_newz wrote: post #59

justinlloyd wrote: post #47

"Selfhosted" solutions: Retro chores: A chores list mounted to the wall. It has a 4K OLED touchscreen that is 20" tall but only 4" wide. Physical toggle switches controlled by electro magnets so that the Raspberry Pi inside can physically toggle the switches. Complete a chore? You toggle the switch. Then the Raspberry Pi, at the end of the day, resets the toggle switch and clears the chore from the list. It's made wi…

How does the cat tracking work?

Loc8tor tag on the cat collar, and a couple of low-power ESP32 beacons in the house to triangulate.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/weekend-side-project-justin-l...

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#63

Post by pathartl » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

A friend and I run an in-person LAN party with about ~20 seats. We play generally older games that existed in a time before Steam. I wasn't happy with manually loading GOG installs onto a machine and often times duplicating or imaging Windows installs would break games.

I ended up writing my own game digital distribution "platform": https://lancommander.app

The client is an addon for Playnite. The backend is a Blazor application. It's been in development for a little over a year, but I'm insanely proud of how far it's come.

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#64

Post by fragmede » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 10:05 PM UTC

I self-host my garage door opener. Instead of having a remote, I have a VPN and password protected webpage that I hit to open my garage. It's come in handy when other people have to access it, I can open it from anywhere I have Internet, and I can give other people access with their own password.

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#65

Post by rcarmo » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 11:35 PM UTC

drewzero1 wrote: post #34

rcarmo wrote: post #20

Wow. My most permanent temporary solution is a doorbell extender I hacked out of an ESP-01 and a buzzer. Whenever the doorbell rings, a door sensor (with a magnetic reed switch) _inserted into the doorbell_ closes, sends a Zigbee packet to my coordinator, which then turns it into an MQTT message, which then gets picked up by Node-RED and re-mapped to the buzzer, which gets it via Wi-Fi. But some of the solutions on t…

Wow, and I thought my doorbell was complicated! I used an ESP-01 with a button to send an HTTP request to my home server, which would send me an XMPP message (to my phone and watch) and also send an HTTP request to another ESP01 which was connected through a relay to an old elevator bell, which would flash and ding twice. It worked reliably enough but some times it would take up to 30 seconds after pushing the button…

Electromagnetism. It’s inside the bell coil.

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#66

Post by the_third_wave » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 11:45 PM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #20

Wow. My most permanent temporary solution is a doorbell extender I hacked out of an ESP-01 and a buzzer. Whenever the doorbell rings, a door sensor (with a magnetic reed switch) _inserted into the doorbell_ closes, sends a Zigbee packet to my coordinator, which then turns it into an MQTT message, which then gets picked up by Node-RED and re-mapped to the buzzer, which gets it via Wi-Fi. But some of the solutions on t…

You left out the part where the Zigbee packet bounces off a feather which trips a switch which closes a circuit which engages a solenoid which rotates a wheel which drops a few kernels of seed on a plate on top of a pair of scales which a chicken then pecks at which is registered by the scales which trigger another solenoid which pushes the 'open' button on a CD-ROM drive which opens, breaking a laser beam which triggers a paper tape reader which is connected to your coordinator which produces that MQTT message.

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#67

Post by the_third_wave » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

Let's set the clock back to 1989, I'm a student at an agricultural university in the Netherlands who just got himself his first CD-player. The thing had an RCA connector on the back marked RC-5 which turned out to be a remote control protocol [1]. Of course there was no Wikipedia back then but we did have a working postal system. I wrote a letter to Philips asking them to provide me some details on this RC-5 protocol and that connector on my new drive so I could create something to interface with it.

A week or so later I got a big envelope containing the electrical characteristics of the connection as well as the timing and coding details for RC-5. Using that data I created an RC-5 interface for the user port on my Commodore-64 which I controlled through an RC-5 driver I created in assembler. Using the C-64, the driver and the adapter I made myself a musical alarm which did wonders for my house mates' early morning rest when I happened to leave the volume on the amplifier a tad too high. I'm pretty sure I was the only one using a 70W hifi alarm clock back then, at least at my university.

Now I just set my phone. Boring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC-5

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#68

Post by firecall » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 12:04 AM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #28

I have a few dozen such things at home. My absolute favorite one though is a bit wild. I am a bit of a security freak. I do however on occasion need to access something on my home network and I also need some redundancy(it wouldn't be the first time my only solution fails and I need a backup). So I use an old raspberry pi as an ssh server with port forwarding with all gimmicks in place(no root, private key only and a…

Have you considered Tailscale or DIY Wireguard?

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#69

Post by drewzero1 » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 5:51 AM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #65

drewzero1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, and I thought my doorbell was complicated! I used an ESP-01 with a button to send an HTTP request to my home server, which would send me an XMPP message (to my phone and watch) and also send an HTTP request to another ESP01 which was connected through a relay to an old elevator bell, which would flash and ding twice. It worked reliably enough but some times it would take up to 30 seconds after pushing the button…

Electromagnetism. It’s inside the bell coil.

Oh, that makes so much more sense. For some reason I was thinking the reed switch was inside the button! Those coils are pretty strong.

Re: Tell me your most exotic selfhosted solution

#70

Post by axegon_ » Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 8:48 AM UTC

firecall wrote: post #68

axegon_ wrote: post #28

I have a few dozen such things at home. My absolute favorite one though is a bit wild. I am a bit of a security freak. I do however on occasion need to access something on my home network and I also need some redundancy(it wouldn't be the first time my only solution fails and I need a backup). So I use an old raspberry pi as an ssh server with port forwarding with all gimmicks in place(no root, private key only and a…

Have you considered Tailscale or DIY Wireguard?

The ssh access server is one way to get in, as I said, redundancy....