I don’t want to hear about your Plex, your NPM, your notes application or science forbid, your budgeting application. I want to hear the most exotic thing you setup to selfhost, that probably only you and a hand full of people around the world actually use or even need. A problem that you solved in a way, that makes people go WTF. Go!
I’ll start: I live in the mountains, and there is snow, lots of snow. I often tell people “We had 3m of snow last year”, but is that really true? So, I thought to myself: Can you measure snowfall? It seems you can, so I setup a USH-9 ultra sound measuring device, connected it via IC2 to my Home Assistant and now I can tell people with confidence, that we had a total of 3.45m of snowfall last season, with max snow height of 60cm on January 5th.
Future project: I have chickens. They lay eggs. I have cameras. I want to know which hen lays how many eggs. Solution? AI image recognition of the hens (who is who) and if they have laid an egg. Any inputs welcome.
0815: Tell me you are German without telling me you are German :D
I have two! The first is exotic purpose, the second is just tightly integrated so much that it might be only useful to me.
Smashcam
I live on a busy corner, in an otherwise slow and sleepy town right outside the city line. I live between a lot of town services on one side (fire house, library, athletic fields, town hall) and the elementary school on the other side. Pedestrian traffic is very high, the amount of children crossing is very high, bicycles abounds, and the cross street between them is decently high traffic.
So I see a decent amount of car accidents on my corner. 30mph limits on both streets so usually not catastrophic, you might be driving away instead of towed. But the repairs will be substantial on most of these. To provide an objective reality-as-a-service, I set up a camera high up in the eaves of my roof pointed right at the intersection. I’ve sent the police enough clips that they know where to archive my emails for evidence by routine. I’ve started training a model to detect car crash noises (and honks) to cut and save the clips automatically. It’s not reliable enough yet, but this could become a reasonable pipeline:
Car crash audio detected -> Notification "Possible crash, do you want to review the footage and send to the po-po?" -> manual human review to make sure we're not sending false positives -> hit send -> email with clip constructed and sentPhotos
This is not exotic in terms of its purpose. Lots or people have self-hosted photo sites (heres a whole chart of them all!)
But none of them integrated with my foss RAW editor darktable.
So I built my own photo site alternative that parses the darktable edit files and DB.
So now on the web, I can see the ☆ ratings I gave the photos in my editor. The tags and labels, etc. I parse the RAW files to show the focus boxes that the cameras write in the metadata when they took the picture, the facial recognition bounding boxes, etc.
And it shows the edit history stack and all the edits from my RAW editor. And of course, it has the left-right swiper to show before/after the photo edits. I can export any size, and it calls out to darktable with command-line control to export with the given edit stack to make the JPG of whatever size I’m requesting.
So yes, alternatives exist. Mine is simply very specialized to a particular editor program. I don’t believe I made the repo public, so as far as I know, I (and my family) are the only ones using it. It’s probably more featureful than things I have released.
Okay, I want your Photos hosting tool, that’s pretty sweet.
Darktables FTW
That with the car crash is awesome. I’ve read a few month ago of a gun shot detector someone was deploying around their city to triangulate where it happened, that’s more sci-fi than anything the law enforcement is doing. Kudos to you for helping out the police.
that’s more sci-fi than anything the law enforcement is doing.
Plenty of cities have gunshot detection and triangulation already. ShotSpotter is just one of the products for sale for this purpose. https://www.soundthinking.com/law-enforcement/leading-gunshot-detection-system/
I hope some police has that, makes pretty much sense since that noise is spot on.
ShotSpotter is used by 100’s of departments across the world.
Our car has wifi so you can connect to it and start the heat/ac. It doesn’t have 5g/4g just no data wifi so you have to be within ~20 feet to warm it up. The app sucks also, along with connecting to its wifi.
Alexa “Warm Up The Car” -> Home Assistant -> trigger an android phone to run a touch script on the phone to run the stupid app and warm up the car -> then report back it did it correctly.
It still fucking works after 5 years and I refuse to even touch the damn thing, as it’s way way too handy when it’s cold out.
Future project: I have chickens. They lay eggs. I have cameras. I want to know which hen lays how many eggs. Solution? AI image recognition of the hens (who is who) and if they have laid an egg. Any inputs welcome.
You’d probably like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/schcw0/diy_smart_chicken_coop_and_inapp_egg_counter/
I too have a chicken cam, but no image recognition at this point. However, I have used it to discover that an opossum was breaking in and eating the eggs.
Other than that, the most unique things I have cobbled together are probably these:
- I work from home, so I created an automation using Home Assistant to tie into the Webex API to determine if I’m on a call or busy and, if so, turn on my Do Not Disturb light so that people don’t just barge into my office.
- A script my son can run from my OliveTin dashboard to update our Minecraft server (docker container).
- Another script I can run from my OliveTin dashboard to log into my firewall and disable/enable my son’s internet.
-- Both of these scripts notify me when they’ve been run via ntfy.I also used a cheap wifi motion sensor to tie into Home Assistant which triggers another automation for a smart bulb in my office to let me know when the dog wants in from the garage.
A former colleague of mine had an even more advanced version of this. Since his dog is chipped, and the chip is RFID, he hooked up an RFID reader to an Arduino, and built a dog door with a motor that automatically opens when his, and only his, dog is there, and sends him a notification.
I love custom HA work flows that are specific to ones needs. Great job! Show’s the beauty of HA that most people miss when all they do is the standard stuff, but you can basically do anything you can imagine. I have door sensors and instead of only relying on a baby monitor, when my toddlers open their door after 2200, the lights turn on in the hallways (so they see something) and a light in our bedroom turns on as well as a notification on the phone. Because sometimes toddlers are sneaky and you hear nothing on the baby monitor. Set this up after I heard one of them cry two floors down (he went through the entire dark house alone down two flights of stairs).
I’m new to hosting my own stuff and automation. Olive tin sounds incredibly useful. I will definitely be looking into that, thank you for that.
That’s what we are all here for: The fun stuff, the unusual stuff, not the 100st post about “how to run Jellyfin”.
I self hosted searxng, but the problem is after I was done I realised that defeats most of the privacy benefits of searxng: If I’m the only one using it, then I might as well just be using the search engines themselves directly.
So now I also have firefox running in a docker container, searching random junk on searxng every couple of minutes.
When I lived off grid, I wrote an energy production measurement application. With both hydroelectric and solar going through a 1990s inverter, it was something. Nowadays these are off the shelf for suburban yuppies, but for my DYI-everything homestead, only DIY would do. Measurement was via shunts. I put it online over satellite internet and could watch my production and static consumption from work.
You built your own hydro? Tell me more!
From what I’ve gathered from youtube you’ll usually need to create a height difference of some sort by damning up a bit of a stream, then have the overflow go through a pipe that’s a sheer drop down onto an impeller attached to an electric motor (bonus points if it’s recycled from something like a washing machine).
Then from that motor it’s on to battery chargers etc…
Using the matrix protocol to let users on Signal talk to ppl on WhatsApp and combined discord telegram etc, I think i made chat apps more like email, interoperability between chat apps are the best.
Mine is a bit exotic I guess. I use Terraform to manage my home lab. I tried all of the docker update solutions out there and they’d always make my Terraform out of sync. So I built my own solution that interacts with an orchestrator, a backend and a front-end.
I use Terraform to create flows for each service. Then the flows interact with the backend to manage the actual updates. The frontend is there to let me see the latest change log of each project before I update.
For my next project I want to set up an oil tank monitor for our heating. Then I can use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor usage. From there I can start making predictions and so on
I am interested. Any public repo of yours available?
Right now it’s private only and basically a V1 home version. I’m planning to rewrite it to make it public.
Long term I want to write terraform resources directly to my backend and take out the orchestrator.
Sounds very cool, and I’m going to be a huge ass and say that could have easily been done with k3s and either flux or argo image watcher.
+1 for terraform at home tho, I do the same and people look at me like I’ve curb stomped their child
Yea. The kubernetes solutions are actually all around more elegant. Especially the HA functionality. But I’ve honestly never had many good experiences with kubernetes. Managed to set it up once at my previous company after a great effort. At my current company we tried to do EKS and rejected it due to the complexity.
+1 for terraform at home tho, I do the same and people look at me like I’ve curb stomped their child
Yes it makes life so much easier. I can easily script every edge case and have it all under version control.
For years, I hosted a PHP script on a personal website that would connect to a weather API, retrieve the weather at my home location, and, depending on it, generate a cute display with HTML/CSS and SVGs. The display looked like a 1500x500 image (though it was a website), where the sun (or moon), clouds (or rain or snow, etc.), were positioned differently based on the weather and time of the day. Additionally, the temperature and other details were displayed.
Then, the script would call an HTML to PDF tool to generate an image from it. This image was, at that time, uploaded to Twitter as my profile banner image. A server cron job would run the script every hour, so my banner would be updated every hour to reflect the weather at my home position.
Why did I do this? I have no idea. Not even sure if anyone noticed, but I could, so I did! Eventually, I ended up turning the script off at some point because it felt childish.
This is a very fun idea and I guess you yourself had lots of fun setting it up that way.
What do you mean childish i would love to use something like that. Maby as profile picture on discord etc.
RemindMe! 4 days
RemindMe! 3 Days
100g in the mountains? Where is this mythical place?
Switzerland, has to be. Once you learn about Init7’s $70 25Gbps FTTH service, you get sad panda.
Luzern.
How about a selfhostable trashmail solution
Hey, thats not useless!!!
0815??
I know it only as a german expression for something extremely common or regular. Apparently it was a type of machine gun used in WW1 and WW2 that was the default weapon and / or of lower quality.