Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

Not sure if this counts:

A lighting desk for my hobby of lighting live music. For reasons I like doing live control along with the music (known as busking). Existing things are either limited and can't control moving lights, or don't have the flexibility to busk the way I want. so, having worked a long time ago for a crowd that built what were at the time the best lighting desks in the world, I built my own

It has 36 motorised faders and a bunch of other boards with buttons, that each ave their own AtTiny to run the function, they talk to a BeagleBone Black which runs the main code loop and uses its on board realtime processors to generate DMX, and a raspberry Pi to run the GUI for configuration.

Worked a treat most of the time, and I've done hundreds of shows with it, with crowds of up to 400 people, Sadly, I made a dumb decision on the protocol for the fader and button boards to talk to the BeagleBone and every now and then it causes a kernel panic on the Beaglebone, which means at best you lose control of the lights and at worst it goes dark on stage.

I started a redesign using a more sensible protocol but got hit by a double whammy of Covid killing the live music scene for a couple of years, plus the all the supply chain issues, so it's on hold now.

This is very interesting! I am a bit new to the hobby (I worked in a relatively small venue for 200 people a couple of times). Till now I used only QLC+ and keyboard+mouse control, which gets really boring and hard to use very soon.

Now I'm starting with designing a small controller on a protoboard with an ESP8266 -- 12 faders, 34 buttons, 4 encoders, 26 RGB LEDs. By sending raw 802.11 frames I may be able to get this thing to work wirelessly.

I'm interested in your design, would you be willing to uplaod some pictures?

Cool stuff. I've got the same hobby / part-time job (mostly on GrandMA consoles). I have done two-three experiments on custom software to emit DMX which I used for something like four events. For the physical interface I'm relying on MIDI controllers; I first want a software stack I can trust before going into hardware design.

Would love to discuss the topic some more! I don't often meet people with that same interest in lighting that want to build their own tools.

If you're ever interested in publishing anything about this to aid others in recreating it, I'm sure there'd be ample interest (for better or worse). Professional controllers are hilariously expensive for many hobbyists and the options for DIY control surfaces tend to be limited (especially with motorized faders).

I'd certainly be interested in reading about how it works, even without anything approaching build documentation.

I'm interested in this as well. Would love to collaborate.

What gratifying interest. to anyone interested in chatting about this, my email address is in my profile, so drop me a line

Where did you get 36 motorized faders without going bankrupt? Even AliExpress ones are $15/each or more!

Easy. bankruptcy. Well, not quite. I got my first lot from a crowd called Top Up indstries in Taiwan (http://www.top-up.com.tw). I think they were around $12 in 2017. I got the next lot as a good deal on Bourne faders from digikey, about $17 NZ, maybe three years ago