I have an automation that is triggered by a door open/close sensor that I have attached to the flushing arm in my toilet with a custom made 3d printed mount for the sensor, which triggers a script on the server which connects to the chromecast speaker in the bathroom and plays the final fantasy 7 battle victory theme whenever someone flushes the toilet. It is perhaps my favorite part of my home.

I have an ESP32 with a sim card and a relay which is controlling the plug to my router. Should I end up being locked out, while someone else has managed to get in, I can send a specific text to a specific number and the esp will kill the power to the router.

Overkill? Considering no one has ever managed to get in, probably. But it's better to have the option than not.

Restaurant customer was really impressed with the tech and kept making new demands:

Q: Can we listen to this cool pandora.com thing over the restaurant speakers?

A: Yes, I we'll use the CCTV cables to run audio from your DVR PC (Pentium 4 I think) to the restaurant AMP. I had the bits and bobs in my car to go from BNC to RCA / 3.5mm.

Q: That's awesome, now can I talk to the customers to make announcements?

A: Sure, see this little speaker icon in the system tray? talk into this mic when you uncheck "mute". Don't forget to mute pandora first.

Q: That's awesome, but I want to make the annoucement from the host station.

A: Let me grab my laptop... Google: VB6 LPT Port. Google: VB6 Volume Mixer. Copy Copy Paste Paste.

Alright, I'm going to mount this old mouse on your wall and solder 2 wires to the clicker (Then to LPT on the DVR PC), it will automatically enable this wall mic when you click the button...

I wrote a script that ran fast.com's speed test every hour. If it detected <105mbit results it would test every 5 minutes for 30 minutes. If it didn't see >105mbits it would do two things, if it was during the day, it'd turn one of the Phillips hue lights in my office to red and turn it on if it wasn't. That let me decide if I could take the downtime during work to fix the Internet or if I'd just live with it. If my partner spotted it, he'd tell me we had a "red light special"

If it was at night, I found there was an undocumented soap protocol for my router and I could reboot it. I didn't care about downtime at night so the script would do it and not deal with the light.

The system worked wonderfully, my partner has asked me to expand the light thing to other situations in the house and other lights. He wants something hooked to his aquarium.

Eventually after about 6 months of this script we took it upon ourselves to replace the ISP Ethernet and made the script unnecessary, but it was a fascinating exercise in stringing together all kinds of random systems, would do it again in a heartbeat, though I might swap the cable first.

What happens to the ones that don't lay enough?

Why? Cordless phones with a second SIM card. ;)

I travel a lot, unlimited data, it serves as a hotspot anyway, so it kind of makes a sense. It has 12GB RAM and 1.2 TB storage. More power intensive servers (Syncthing) shutdown if battery is low.

A week or so later I got a big envelope containing the electrical characteristics of the connection as well as the timing and coding details for RC-5. Using that data I created an RC-5 interface for the user port on my Commodore-64 which I controlled through an RC-5 driver I created in assembler. Using the C-64, the driver and the adapter I made myself a musical alarm which did wonders for my house mates' early morning rest when I happened to leave the volume on the amplifier a tad too high. I'm pretty sure I was the only one using a 70W hifi alarm clock back then, at least at my university.

Now I just set my phone. Boring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC-5

But some of the solutions on that thread actually make me comfortable with the way this works...

I primarily use this to track my 30+ plants using cheaper, lower power, pairing-free and more reliable RF ping-based soil sensors.

I dooo get pager alerts about my potted plants tho.

https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/10/06/canastra-on-the-go/

I am super excited about Firefox extensions, especially on Android. Until recently, you could add them, but then when the browser was killed for OOM, you needed to reload them and that required using ADB on a laptop. So, when I was out and about, I was stuck.

But, then I figured out that if I connected my Android device to my wireguard connection, then I could script my desktop machine to connect to my Android phone using ADB and install the extension remotely, even from thousands of miles away. The trick was that to turn on Wireless debugging in Android, you have to be on the screen with wireless debugging enabled and cannot leave it until the connection is made (so you cannot manually turn on the ADB push). I figured out a hack that involved taking a screenshot with the dynamic port and syncing that screenshot using syncthing and then a bit of OCR.

There's no categorization (well... there is, but it's in my large behind-the-scenes Baserow[1] list), but there is a LOT of self hosted software in there. It's just a bit annoying to get to right now without search/categorization.

https://youtu.be/uuRDD-5Vv9k

I use my router to host my house's DNS zone (it's set up as a secondary), along with the TLD zone NS records. I still haven't solved how to do that with DNSSEC, but it's on my TODO list.

Next, I have a SIP-based intercom system built on Cisco videophone, with a self-made doorbell on a RPi with a camera and a microphone. It can call my cellphone via a SIP gateway, but so far I haven't solved how to make video SIP calls to cell phones. I don't think it's even possible, so I'll probably switch to Telegram or WhatsApp API instead (I have both on my phone anyway).

Of course, I have a local video security that mirrors in real time to the cloud, and two redundant Internet connections (a fiber to my ISP and Starlink). Everything automation-related is POE-powered, with a battery backup (and I'm working on adding remote monitoring to a Jackery power bank).

It's a pretty fun way to spend some time tinkering with technology.

I also setup an esphome automation on another plug that my space heater is plugged into. The obvious next step is a GitHub Action that fires 30 minutes before I wake up and turns on the heater plug.

We leave the radio on for our dog when we're not home. I have a z-wave button that triggers Home Assistant to turn on the AVR to radio and set the volume to a decent level. But on rare occasion the Shield Android TV plugged into the same AVR sees it turning on as an invitation for it to also turn on(which it should if we were actually setting the AVR to it's input source). And when it turns on, the TV also turns on.

I could detect the AVR is on the wrong source and switch it back to radio, but the TV would stay on because the AVR outputs info about the radio channel to the TV.

I don't keep my TV on the network so my plan is to setup a WiFi controlled IR blaster that will turn off the TV when I detect the AVR is on the wrong input.

I ended up writing my own game digital distribution "platform": https://lancommander.app

The client is an addon for Playnite. The backend is a Blazor application. It's been in development for a little over a year, but I'm insanely proud of how far it's come.

Back when I was a prof., there was a monitor mounted on the wall outside my office whose display I had control of (it was from the previous prof and I inherited it).

I connected it to a RPi and set it to display a website. The website was one that I wrote that did 2 things. First, it displayed a random XKCD comic, rotating every 30 seconds, as well as a scrolling message at the bottom (usually just a disclaimer that the images were chosen at random). Second, it was an endpoint for Twilio.

The end result was that I could send a text message from my phone and it would display that message on the monitor on the wall outside my office. It rejected any message that was not from my number. I used it to display things like: "Had to run across campus. Be back at 1:30." or "Left for the day." And, since people would often stop and read the comics, they would definitely see the message.

If you click about you can see just how seasonal/weather sensitive it is.

Retro chores: A chores list mounted to the wall. It has a 4K OLED touchscreen that is 20" tall but only 4" wide. Physical toggle switches controlled by electro magnets so that the Raspberry Pi inside can physically toggle the switches. Complete a chore? You toggle the switch. Then the Raspberry Pi, at the end of the day, resets the toggle switch and clears the chore from the list. It's made with 21st century technology looks like it came straight from Atari in the 1970's. All walnut, and teak and brush metal.

Retro Jukebox: Two vertical 4K OLED touch screens, two curved 2K AMOLED touch screens, lots of physical jukebox style radio buttons that can be programmatically reset, all controlled by a Raspberry Pi, brushed metal and wood case, and now wired into ChatGPT so I can say things like "whatever happened to these guys?"

Time-synchronized wall clocks: Eight separate analogue timezone aware clocks controlled with dual axis stepper motors, and a sizable amount of VFD displays, all run from a single Raspberry Pi. The controller changes the VFD under each clock to show the name, the offset from local time, weather in the time zone, and a few headlines. It's motion and IR sensitive so the VFDs shut down when nobody is around to watch them.

Daily Guk: It's a newspaper running on an old 21" android tablet that shows good news for the day, our calendar, comics, local weather.

Memories: It's 18 x 9" OLED displays artfully arranged on the wall and driven by a Raspberry Pi that pulls images from our stash of digital photos. Motion sensing so they turn-off when nobody is around.

Arcade Cabinet Rack: I have two 4U workstations and a 3U UPS, plus a 1U network switch I installed in a custom built cabinet that is about 30" tall, and then I built another cabinet on top of that which is an arcade machine that plays a bunch of retro games on a Skull Canyon NUC.

The Wall: I salvaged a bunch of 55" 4K TVs, stripped them down to their components and then built them in to a fake wall, with sliding rice paper shoji screens in front of them, and the screens show peaceful calming nature scenes. Display can run in 2D or 3D mode. Driven by an old i7 and a quadro card.

CNC Controller: An android tablet that talks to a Raspberry Pi that controls my two CNCs littleboy and fatman because I got tired of the CNC cuts failing due to network connectivity issues.

CNC Dove tailer: It's an aluminium jig that I cut on the CNC that lets me vertically mount a board at the end of the CNC to cut dove tails nice and clean.

Walking timer: It's a simple stop watch Windows app with some big buttons to start and stop the timer and add laps that my wife and I use to track our neighbourhood walks. I added some computer vision smarts to it so it can pull the video from the front door camera and automatically start the timer and track our laps around the block using gait analysis and image recognition.

Home health: It's a custom made home dashboard that tracks calendars, emails, locates the cell phones, locates our wallets, tracks the cats, shows our meal plan for the week, local weather and so on.

Cat toy robot arm (no longer available to play): I built a robot arm with different attachment options; a laser pointer and a feather on a bendy stick. You could control this robot arm over the internet, through a web browser, and there were live camera feeds to the web browser window. And you could donate money to play with the cats in the shelter for a period of time. Like an arcade game. And all the cats got adopted.

Cat toy touch screen: I salvaged a 50" LCD and installed an infrared touch screen and turned it into a large cat that sits on the floor that lets the cat chase a virtual mouse around the screen.

RTS sand box: A couple of high res overhead projectors and a few kinects and some sand in a box and we have an RTS game you can fight little war games on. I don't think the installation is at the science museum anymore.

Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job.

Waterfall Ring toss: I salvaged a 55" 4K TV and made a physics based retro game where you try and get rings onto pylons, that was then installed in the door of an art gallery, which was closed due to the pandemic. Big mashable button on the front of the machine so you could play the game.

This blows my mind, and I love it. What sort of limits did you put on the Mechanical Turk service to keep people from farming the... you know... turds.