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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: 0.215s | 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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johnboiles ◴[28 Apr 23 14:58 UTC] No.35742079[source]▶
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 :)

replies(3): >>35742173 #>>35748259 #>>35776916 #
1. stwr ◴[01 May 23 18:19 UTC] No.35776916[source]▶
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 :)