Self-Hosted Main

The last place I lived was heated with an enormous pellet stove which would run itself out of pellets entirely before letting out an ear-splitting series of beeps and forcibly shutting off for about an hour. To avoid this, I taped an ultrasonic distance sensor to the lid of the hopper and had an ESP32 send me alerts and display the current pellet level on a little OLED.

Not a terribly dumb idea, except for the fact that ultrasonic distance sensors seem to be incredibly bad at measuring a constantly shifting mass of porous pellets. I don't even know how many hours I spent working on an algorithm to get accurate readings, and by the time I moved out it still wasn't quite right. I'll also note that this pellet stove was in the living room, about 5 feet away from where I spent most of my time, and I could've just, ya know, got up and checked the hopper occasionally.

The industry I work in has many many companies. For whatever reason they all seem to use a very similar website template. Job openings are almost always listed on their webpage. Almost always its a plugin from workday or whatever their HR software is. Years ago I noticed that job listings were almost always published to their websites before they appeared on major job sites like linkedin.

I used a business to business website that lists every single company in this industry by location and has a link for each to generate a list of companys and URLS. I monitor this for changes with changedetection.io

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Then changedetection.io + company list and their job posting URLS that look like this company.com/careers/join-us/?_sft_job_posting_category=technical

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So I now have about 800 companies that I am able to monitor for job leads and get notified via NTFY with company, job title and job description.

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Its turned off currently cause I am actively employed, but when I was looking about a year ago I had it running hourly and if I look again I will indeed use it

Love the stuff from the comments here.

For me, not so WTF but still a little overkill. My Parents have a sauna in the Garden which we occasionally use. But in the winter it’s cold and you don’t want to check outside for the temperature of the sauna until you go in. So my cousin and be build a little WebUI and Python script which allows us to monitor the temperature and control the state of the sauna remotely. 10m from living room garden sauna saved 😅

I’m up for the chicken challenge, dad wants to have chickens, we live too far apart. It’s reusable, plus now you can know which chickens will go to nuggets and which give you omelette

I have 4 kids. I had a kid-management app running at home for a while.

It assigned chores in a rotation, including periodic chores like cleaning out the fridge which didn't need to happen every day. The kid interface had a simple green button they could click to say they'd done their chore.

When THAT happened, their fake bank allowance balance would increase.

The server side piece would track how long they were logged in and lock their screen after 30 minutes of screen time a day

The parent side included a form to track spending (decreasing their balance) and to enable and disable their user accounts on the computer. It could also grant additional screen time if needed.

The kids are older now and like hoarding cash instead of a balance, and they aren't as motivated by screen time as they used to be. So the app is no longer in use.

I used to pull AIS data and filter by sightlines to buzz my Blackberry to let me know when I could see boats out my window.

Long-term plans are to put up a tower and get flight data, ionospheric conditions, weather, lightning, particulate, light quality, as well as a pair of cameras to get sunrise and sunset.

My town used to post our garbage pickup schedule as a photo pdf to our town's website.

They tend to change when garbage will be picked up randomly espcially near holidays, so it can be annoying and we'd end up running out in the morning when we heard the truck driving by on 'off' days

The changes always made it into the calendar at least the night before.

I wrote a horrible python abortion to grab the PDF, OCR the data, and then put it into HA so I can have HA turn a light on in my hallway the night before.

These days they make the calendar available as an iCal file so data ingest is way easier.

Just about all my projects are (or rather were) on github. The hidden ones are due to redditors trolling or being outright shitheads, so I had to hide some projects temporarily.

Timezone aware clocks

I have a wall of eight timezone aware clocks, with the arms controlled via stepper motors to a single raspberry pi. The Raspberry Pi also controls eight separate OLED displays that are made to emulate VFDs. And then I set each clock to the timezone it corresponds to, pull the weather and temps from the internet and send them to each display, and also show some headlines for the region. When you need to talk to a client, you know what time it is there, what the weather is like, and recent news headlines.

Chore list

I have a chore list that displays on 12"x4" touch screen, with physical electromechanical toggle switches that are controlled by a raspberry pi. This chore list reminds me to clean the litter box, water the plants, pay the car insurance, etc. When I complete a chore, I flip the physical toggle switch and the chore gets marked as done until the next time. After a while, the chore disappears from the display, and the raspberry pi releases the electromagnet and resets the physical toggle switch back to the "undone" position.

Jukebox

I have a physical jukebox I built, that mounts on the wall, that streams music from my Synology. It has a bunch of super satisfying to press clicky tactile LED illuminated arcade buttons for track select, and the track lists are shown on two 4K 12"x4" touch screens. There's two more 1920 curved touchscreens for the marquee to show album art and for navigation. That's a single raspberry pi controlling four separate touch screens and about 50 buttons. When you press a button to play a track, the button locks down, like on the old car radios, but the raspberry pi when switching tracks can physically retract or release the buttons too. There's a software defined jog wheel that has an OLED display to control the volume, but the raspberry pi can turn the physical dial too. That's wired into chatgpt, speech to text and text to speech, with cortana as the voice, and I can say things like "whatever happened to the lead singer of this band?" or "Play a random shuffle of more tracks from this year."

Memories

18x 9" OLED screens that display a photo montage and photo gallery of family pictures all controlled by a raspberry pi.

The Wall

It's a half-dozen salvaged OLED displays built into a false wall behind some sliding shoji screens. The displays are driven by some old piece-of-shit computer and GPU. They display nature scenes. It's an enormous digital window.

Home Health

I have a smart dashboard that tracks my cats, phones, wallets, weather, and a bunch of other info that is displayed on an ipad by the coffee machine.

Daily Guk

It's an old 21" android tablet that displays only good headlines, daily funny comics, weather, upcoming calendar, etc.

Cat Toy

It's a 55" touch screen that entertains my cats. Android stick plugged into the back running some custom Unity3D games.

Walking Timer

I built a timer that tracks how long we walk, and how many laps we do around the block, and then I grab the images from the doorbell camera and use computer vision and gait analysis to automatically detects when we leave, when we return, and how many times we walked past the front door on our laps, and calculates our speed.

CNC Controller

I have a CNC controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which in turn is controlled by an Android tablet. So if the UI crashes, the CNC will continue running the gcode. This could now be replaced by other open source projects that have become available since I created this setup.

RV Sync

I have an all flash NAS at the RV which is set to automatically sync the video & music directories, and a few other directories, between my NAS at my home and the NAS in the RV so that all the contents are available when on the road, even if internet is a bit wonky.

Retired Projects

Cat Litter Robot

This was a litter box, with a Kinect, a web cam, a Fujitsu robot arm, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The robot arm was controllable via a web UI and it live streamed the litter box. When a cat did their business, the kinect detected that, weighed the litter box, and then sent a request to mechanical turk to have someone clean the litter box for 25 cents. And then when they were done, two more requests were sent to mechanical turk to have other people independently verify that the video showed the litter box being cleaned adequately.

Giant Waterfall Ring Toss

An art gallery in Los Angeles wanted something as an attraction due to the pandemic, so I salvaged a 55" display, built an enclosure, and installed it in the upper glass portion of the door frame of the art gallery, and people could play the classic "Waterfall Ring Toss" game by mashing a great big button.

Remote Control Cat Toy

I built a web browser controlled remote cat toy with one of those feathers on a wand controlled by a number of servos. And also added a laser point option too. Then had a bunch of web cams live stream the adoptable cats in the shelter. And people could donate a $1 to "play the arcade game" with cats that would get unlocked as people contributed more money.

Planetarium

I built a 12 foot wide classic planetarium driven by a raspberry pi and a lot of really strong high torque servos for a science museum exhibit. Kids could use a jog shuttle dial to rotate the planetary orbits.

The Matrix Camera Capture Rig

I built a cheap camera capture rig for a science museum that works like the Bullet Time rigs, but this was done with cheap point & shoot SONY cameras. Patrons sit on a couch, or pose in a movie set, and the capture rig takes a snapshot, puts a video on the monitor for them that orbits the subjects.

Digital Sandbox RTS

A box of physical "wet sand" that you could play in, that projected an image from three overhead projectors, and you controlled a small army you could send into combat against other people playing in the sandbox. Kind of like a simple Populous game. That was on display at one of the Los Angeles kids science museums for a few years.

Got a server and wanted to know what the temperature was in my room where it runs Installed VMware on it and a SIEM as a virtual appliance on top, poll the VMware API every minute to get the reading from the temperature sensor so that I can look at it from my phone's web browser. Overkill: Quite certainly Useful: Definitely

Newsweek Poland has pdf version and I am a subscriber. Unfortunately there is no mechanism on their page to schedule sending newest magazine to subscriber email. There is only a button in subscriber section to send selected pdf (link) to email. I wrote client which is logging in, bypassing captcha, gets listing of current issues, looks into history of downloaded issues and downloads newest issue for me. They offer in the same subscription other magazines too, so I extended this tool to also download others too.

Second one. I use IPTV service which has time shift functionality. I wrote app which allows me to download any tv program within this 3-4 day window of past tv show. It is using ffmpeg and some logic.

Would probably get more zanier responses on the Home Automation or Home Assistant subreddits.

I have kubernetes cluster running a vanilla warcraft server full of computer controlled bots that play in the world while I'm offline, just chuggs away all day then sometimes I log in and see how the bots are doing and play a little.

I wrote my own SMS gateway API with authentication tokens, quotas, rate-limits. This is because I wanted to send SMS without relying on an external API, so I got a 2€/month SIM card and plugged a USB modem (Huawei E169) into my RPi to use with Gammu. I'm using Gotify to log sent and received SMS, and send an SMS whenever my home internet is down or the IP address changes for example. It's plugged into my systems monitoring for critical alerts, and while I offered API keys to my friends, none of them wanted any so I'm the sole user.

0815??

How about a selfhostable trashmail solution

Using the matrix protocol to let users on Signal talk to ppl on WhatsApp and combined discord telegram etc, I think i made chat apps more like email, interoperability between chat apps are the best.

Custom rss to iptv solution that monitors Peertube channels, scrapes the videos to grab a m3u8 if available and consolidates it to a iptv vod m3u with xmltv to serve it to my stream station

I'm not hosting anything exotic right now, but in the past, before the -arrs existed, back in the 2000s:

• Linux computers in every room, all PXE booted thin clients I crafted myself from a pallete of off-lease computers
• A custom RSS feed to rtorrent to a MythTV setup that migrated video as you walked between rooms.

The first one was actually useful. The second one was more of a novelty I'd show to visitors.

I was thinking OP is gonna do something like snow cooling solution thingy.... 😃😃 haha

I do work for multiple organizations and got tired of having to disconnect/reconnect VPN tunnels each time.

Solution: Raspberry Pi. It's got a single Ethernet port on it which makes it perfect. I used Openconnect since it was compatible with Cisco and PulseSecure (at the time). When you establish a tunnel, the routes come in as "kernel routes" assuming you have a split tunnel. I configured IPTables to NAT masquerade out each interface and I set up Quagga, a routing daemon to talk to my main gateway and redistributed my kernel routes into OSPF. That way, any of my devices can now access any networks they need. I did also have to configure my own DNS server since I needed to resolve the different private networks.