I have two! The first is exotic purpose, the second is just tightly integrated so much that it might be only useful to me.

Smashcam

I live on a busy corner, in an otherwise slow and sleepy town right outside the city line. I live between a lot of town services on one side (fire house, library, athletic fields, town hall) and the elementary school on the other side. Pedestrian traffic is very high, the amount of children crossing is very high, bicycles abounds, and the cross street between them is decently high traffic.

So I see a decent amount of car accidents on my corner. 30mph limits on both streets so usually not catastrophic, you might be driving away instead of towed. But the repairs will be substantial on most of these. To provide an objective reality-as-a-service, I set up a camera high up in the eaves of my roof pointed right at the intersection. I’ve sent the police enough clips that they know where to archive my emails for evidence by routine. I’ve started training a model to detect car crash noises (and honks) to cut and save the clips automatically. It’s not reliable enough yet, but this could become a reasonable pipeline:

Car crash audio detected ->
Notification "Possible crash, do you want to review the footage and send to the po-po?" ->
manual human review to make sure we're not sending false positives ->
hit send ->
email with clip constructed and sent

Photos

This is not exotic in terms of its purpose. Lots or people have self-hosted photo sites (heres a whole chart of them all!)

But none of them integrated with my foss RAW editor darktable.

So I built my own photo site alternative that parses the darktable edit files and DB.

So now on the web, I can see the ☆ ratings I gave the photos in my editor. The tags and labels, etc. I parse the RAW files to show the focus boxes that the cameras write in the metadata when they took the picture, the facial recognition bounding boxes, etc.

And it shows the edit history stack and all the edits from my RAW editor. And of course, it has the left-right swiper to show before/after the photo edits. I can export any size, and it calls out to darktable with command-line control to export with the given edit stack to make the JPG of whatever size I’m requesting.

So yes, alternatives exist. Mine is simply very specialized to a particular editor program. I don’t believe I made the repo public, so as far as I know, I (and my family) are the only ones using it. It’s probably more featureful than things I have released.

I self hosted searxng, but the problem is after I was done I realised that defeats most of the privacy benefits of searxng: If I’m the only one using it, then I might as well just be using the search engines themselves directly.

So now I also have firefox running in a docker container, searching random junk on searxng every couple of minutes.

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.

Our car has wifi so you can connect to it and start the heat/ac. It doesn’t have 5g/4g just no data wifi so you have to be within ~20 feet to warm it up. The app sucks also, along with connecting to its wifi.

Alexa “Warm Up The Car” -> Home Assistant -> trigger an android phone to run a touch script on the phone to run the stupid app and warm up the car -> then report back it did it correctly.

It still fucking works after 5 years and I refuse to even touch the damn thing, as it’s way way too handy when it’s cold out.

I suppose my most well known one is a recreation of the BBC’s Ceefax service (https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/) - I wrote a program which scrapes the BBC and various other sources for data and turns it into old-style teletext pages. All hosted from my rack in the attic. Not very exotic but still.

I’ve recently did something that made my friend go “why the fuck would you even need that?”

I’ve recently discovered that I can’t neither VPN into my VPS nor my home network from my college. Both OpenVPN and wireguard were not working. So, to fix that, I’m running a shadowsocks proxy, which is behind an nginx reverse proxy, through which I connect to my services.

Now, I haven’t tested it with my college network yet, but based on other similar reddit posts I’ve read, it should theoretically work.

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.

This sounds like r/diwhy for homelabs! 🤣

The stupid printer didn’t have decent Linux support, so after we moved I couldn’t change its wifi settings to give it the credentials to the new network. Solution: I created a secondary, isolated SSID on the wifi AP to replicate the old wifi network that the printer knew, and now we could connect to the printer over wifi again. (And security bonus, it was now on an isolated subnet.)

100g in the mountains? Where is this mythical place?

I’ve recently did something that made my friend go “why the fuck would you even need that?”

I’ve recently discovered that I can’t neither VPN into my VPS nor my home network from my college. Both OpenVPN and wireguard were not working. So, to fix that, I’m running a shadowsocks proxy, which is behind an nginx reverse proxy, through which I connect to my services.

Now, I haven’t tested it with my college network yet, but based on other similar reddit posts I’ve read, it should theoretically work.

For years, I hosted a PHP script on a personal website that would connect to a weather API, retrieve the weather at my home location, and, depending on it, generate a cute display with HTML/CSS and SVGs. The display looked like a 1500x500 image (though it was a website), where the sun (or moon), clouds (or rain or snow, etc.), were positioned differently based on the weather and time of the day. Additionally, the temperature and other details were displayed.

Then, the script would call an HTML to PDF tool to generate an image from it. This image was, at that time, uploaded to Twitter as my profile banner image. A server cron job would run the script every hour, so my banner would be updated every hour to reflect the weather at my home position.

Why did I do this? I have no idea. Not even sure if anyone noticed, but I could, so I did! Eventually, I ended up turning the script off at some point because it felt childish.

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.

As few years ago, when my son was a teenager, he had selective hearing, would never come to dinner on time, never do his choirs etc… all he did was play xbox and scream at his friends down xbox live until 2 or 3am… typically moody teenager!

My wife got close to breaking point… I ended up creating a web app, that would enable and disable his Internet access, or limit his to school websites etc, or set a schedule for his access, which could be selectively ended when he’s good.

I then brought a load of those Amazon wifi order buttons, and tied each button to a different feature… so she literally pressed one button to suddenly get him to his attention.

To be fair, he wasn’t terrible, and always did well at school…

For detection of chickens and such, you could likely use Frigate NVR paired with a hardware accelerated gpu for deception based on algorithms.

https://docs.frigate.video/configuration/objects/

It has birds as an option in the builtin object detections so maybe that would pick up a chicken!