←back to thread

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

1901 points l2silver | 4 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | 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.
Show context
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.

replies(25): >>35738302 #>>35738315 #>>35738393 #>>35738432 #>>35738542 #>>35738575 #>>35738587 #>>35738736 #>>35739651 #>>35739777 #>>35740536 #>>35740720 #>>35740775 #>>35740917 #>>35741401 #>>35741960 #>>35742554 #>>35742557 #>>35743709 #>>35744493 #>>35747963 #>>35748124 #>>35753931 #>>35755556 #>>35764329 #
1. mixmastamyk ◴[28 Apr 23 16:38 UTC] No.35743709[source]▶
Earth Angel, will you be mine…

How about a speech synthesis DJ, “that was Foo McBar from 19XX”?

replies(1): >>35755382 #
2. follower ◴[29 Apr 23 17:59 UTC] No.35755382[source]▶
Since I've been playing around with Piper Text-to-Speech & the associated LibriTTS voice model, I couldn't resist:

* https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/#various_radio...

If the six speakers I selected for the demo don't match your taste in DJs, there's around 900 more in that voice model to try... :D

(The 3 audio players differ only in file format & whether I ran the output through normalization.)

Also, I was pretty impressed/surprised at the quality of their pronunciation of the meta-syntactic variables. :)

replies(2): >>35759187 #>>35762225 #
3. mixmastamyk ◴[30 Apr 23 02:24 UTC] No.35759187[source]▶
Ha, that’s awesome. Several of the voices sounded just right for radio. I see the lib is limited to 24khz, maybe why it has an almost AM radio sound?
4. drivers99 ◴[30 Apr 23 13:11 UTC] No.35762225[source]▶
They all sound out of breath. Not sure what causes that effect/perception. Listening to it again, it seems like the plosives (like d, or t) have no pop like there was no air pressure behind them.