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

A Bluetooth dongle for my standing desk that lets me control it from my Mac. I kept bumping the wired remote with my chair when it was mounted under the table and since it had a fat Cat5 cable, it was too ugly to have on the table.

So I hooked the remote up to an oscilloscope, figured out the signals it uses and used a nRF52 dev kit plus a small custom PCB shield to be able to control it over BLE. A small toolbar utility for the Mac and it’s more convenient than it’s ever been.

Reminds me of a prank I pulled with a mate on a colleague. They recently got standing desks and of course a bit of fun ensued with them. Over one weekend we build a remote control for it based on an ESP32, of course fully MQTT compatible. We hid it as best as we could and it was not visible unless you crawled under the desk. Fun was had, because you could just program the behavior via a small python script and override the physical buttons. It also was briefly hooked up to my Home Assistant for voice control.

We used nothing as fancy as an oscilloscope, bought a new RJ11 cable, cut it in half and interposed the connection from the remote to the controller. We also used relays, just for the nice clicking sound :)

My plan was to get my setup super fancy to also display the current height and memory functions from within the Mac utility, so it had to read the full protocol that the remote used. Up/down alone was supposed to be the proof of concept, but once I got it working, it was good enough that I didn't really care about the rest.