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

1901 points l2silver | 3 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.68s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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sriram_malhar ◴[28 Apr 23 06:47 UTC] No.35738249[source]▶
My MIL is 93, and the only tech she can really deal with is turning on the radio and TV and changing channels.

She is fond of music from old classics (from the 60's and earlier), so I hooked up a Raspberry PI with an FM transmitter and created her own private radio station. She tells me what songs she likes and I create different playlists that get broadcast on her station. It preserves the surprise element of radio, and there is nothing in there she doesn't like.

The tiny FM transmitter is surprisingly powerful. Her neighbours (of similar vintage) are very happy too, so their requests have also started coming in :)

EDIT: I wanted to add that I am the UI ... she doesn't get to choose the playlist. To make my life easier, I just created different playlists for different times of the day ... calm/spiritual/slower numbers in the early and late hours, peppy during the late morning and evening etc.

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davchana ◴[28 Apr 23 06:54 UTC] No.35738302[source]▶
Would love to see a blog about this setup. I, not old, always want to dump much of my music & simply want to listen whatever is next (& miss it if I don't listen) just like radio.
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1. ecliptik ◴[28 Apr 23 08:07 UTC] No.35738746[source]▶
Have you seen Icecast [1]? You create playlists of local music, then play them with something like mpd. Icecast then streams them out and clients like VLC, xmms2, and even older versions of Winamp can stream it.

I set this up for all my music in shuffle mode for my own radio-like always on streaming service via Tailscale.

1. https://icecast.org/faq/

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2. lloydatkinson ◴[28 Apr 23 08:35 UTC] No.35738924[source]▶
I’ve wanted to try something like this with a Pi or something else running Linux. Is mpd a good choice for that scenario? Does it support being able to use custom events eg a button on the gpio for play/pause?
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3. nsteel ◴[28 Apr 23 11:17 UTC] No.35739874[source]▶
mpd is a great choice, there are lots of things built around it. Essentially, you'd have the GPIOs trigger mpc commands. mpc talks MPD over the network back to the mpd server, so you could have physical controls all around the place.

There are lots of examples online of people doing this sort of thing. There's a simple example at https://github.com/pablodo/mpd_gpio/blob/master/main.py

Even a chapter of a book about it: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4842-2406-9_... (I just found this, no idea if it's any good).

And also an IR version at https://www.ziemski.net/rcmpd/