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

1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | 27 Apr 23 15:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.258s | 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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jo-m ◴[28 Apr 23 08:49 UTC] No.35738987[source]▶
I have a rail line right under my apartment, so I built a small computer vision app running on a Rasperry Pi which records each train passing, and tries to stitch an image of it.

It has a frontend at https://trains.jo-m.ch/.

Edit: it's currently raining and the rain drops are disturbing the images a bit.

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bombcar ◴[28 Apr 23 17:52 UTC] No.35744731[source]▶
This is close to what I've always wanted to build; a camera watching the road next to me that records the speed of the vehicle traveling by. I should have everything needed from a simple camera setup, but I've not bothered actually doing it.

Since you have speed, I should dig into this.

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hyeomans ◴[28 Apr 23 18:26 UTC] No.35745202[source]▶
Same here, I have a Pi 3 but I want to have this outside in the balcony, the question that always stops me is how to power it and what camera do I meed?
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1. bombcar ◴[28 Apr 23 19:31 UTC] No.35746033[source]▶
My plan was to stick the Pi inside, and power both it and the camera with Power over Ethernet (external-rated PoE cameras are a dime-a-dozen on Alibaba and friends).

I even got so far as to get it working with Zoneminder to dump out the clips that had motion, but didn't get further.