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

My wife and I lived on a Sailboat for a few years. The boat had a 20 year old SeaTalk bus connected to the sensors (depth, wind speed/direction, water speed). I bought a newer radio with an AIS receiver. Of course I wanted to hook it all to my computer & phone.

So I built some hardware to interface with the SeaTalk network, the AIS radio (and a modern GPS) https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-hardware https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-firmware

And a Python proxy running on a Pi to pass messages back and forth across the network. https://github.com/johnboiles/NMEAProxy

And an iOS app that could drive my autopilot https://github.com/johnboiles/helm-ios

Since my proxy spoke the NMEA standard, you could also hook up with other apps like iSailor and get all the sensor data + gps + AIS data. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wärtsilä-isailor/id398456162

To my knowledge, 0 other people have ever used any of this but I've always been proud of it :)

I'm always impressed by hardware hacks.

I also made my own variable speed diaphragm water pump for our boat's water pressure. The VSD options on the market were notoriously unreliable, so I took one of the best non-VSD pumps with a pressure switch and drove it with a custom board + software. This also meant if my controller failed (which it never did) I could switch back to the original pressure switch.

https://github.com/johnboiles/openvsd

Nice this is awesome! Well done. Once you have everything in NMEA it really does become very easy to integrate with other marine hardware/software. Literally everything runs on it :)