Self-Hosted Main

Love the stuff from the comments here.

For me, not so WTF but still a little overkill. My Parents have a sauna in the Garden which we occasionally use. But in the winter it’s cold and you don’t want to check outside for the temperature of the sauna until you go in. So my cousin and be build a little WebUI and Python script which allows us to monitor the temperature and control the state of the sauna remotely. 10m from living room garden sauna saved 😅

I used to pull AIS data and filter by sightlines to buzz my Blackberry to let me know when I could see boats out my window.

Long-term plans are to put up a tower and get flight data, ionospheric conditions, weather, lightning, particulate, light quality, as well as a pair of cameras to get sunrise and sunset.

Just about all my projects are (or rather were) on github. The hidden ones are due to redditors trolling or being outright shitheads, so I had to hide some projects temporarily.

Timezone aware clocks

I have a wall of eight timezone aware clocks, with the arms controlled via stepper motors to a single raspberry pi. The Raspberry Pi also controls eight separate OLED displays that are made to emulate VFDs. And then I set each clock to the timezone it corresponds to, pull the weather and temps from the internet and send them to each display, and also show some headlines for the region. When you need to talk to a client, you know what time it is there, what the weather is like, and recent news headlines.

Chore list

I have a chore list that displays on 12"x4" touch screen, with physical electromechanical toggle switches that are controlled by a raspberry pi. This chore list reminds me to clean the litter box, water the plants, pay the car insurance, etc. When I complete a chore, I flip the physical toggle switch and the chore gets marked as done until the next time. After a while, the chore disappears from the display, and the raspberry pi releases the electromagnet and resets the physical toggle switch back to the "undone" position.

Jukebox

I have a physical jukebox I built, that mounts on the wall, that streams music from my Synology. It has a bunch of super satisfying to press clicky tactile LED illuminated arcade buttons for track select, and the track lists are shown on two 4K 12"x4" touch screens. There's two more 1920 curved touchscreens for the marquee to show album art and for navigation. That's a single raspberry pi controlling four separate touch screens and about 50 buttons. When you press a button to play a track, the button locks down, like on the old car radios, but the raspberry pi when switching tracks can physically retract or release the buttons too. There's a software defined jog wheel that has an OLED display to control the volume, but the raspberry pi can turn the physical dial too. That's wired into chatgpt, speech to text and text to speech, with cortana as the voice, and I can say things like "whatever happened to the lead singer of this band?" or "Play a random shuffle of more tracks from this year."

Memories

18x 9" OLED screens that display a photo montage and photo gallery of family pictures all controlled by a raspberry pi.

The Wall

It's a half-dozen salvaged OLED displays built into a false wall behind some sliding shoji screens. The displays are driven by some old piece-of-shit computer and GPU. They display nature scenes. It's an enormous digital window.

Home Health

I have a smart dashboard that tracks my cats, phones, wallets, weather, and a bunch of other info that is displayed on an ipad by the coffee machine.

Daily Guk

It's an old 21" android tablet that displays only good headlines, daily funny comics, weather, upcoming calendar, etc.

Cat Toy

It's a 55" touch screen that entertains my cats. Android stick plugged into the back running some custom Unity3D games.

Walking Timer

I built a timer that tracks how long we walk, and how many laps we do around the block, and then I grab the images from the doorbell camera and use computer vision and gait analysis to automatically detects when we leave, when we return, and how many times we walked past the front door on our laps, and calculates our speed.

CNC Controller

I have a CNC controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which in turn is controlled by an Android tablet. So if the UI crashes, the CNC will continue running the gcode. This could now be replaced by other open source projects that have become available since I created this setup.

RV Sync

I have an all flash NAS at the RV which is set to automatically sync the video & music directories, and a few other directories, between my NAS at my home and the NAS in the RV so that all the contents are available when on the road, even if internet is a bit wonky.

Retired Projects

Cat Litter Robot

This was a litter box, with a Kinect, a web cam, a Fujitsu robot arm, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The robot arm was controllable via a web UI and it live streamed the litter box. When a cat did their business, the kinect detected that, weighed the litter box, and then sent a request to mechanical turk to have someone clean the litter box for 25 cents. And then when they were done, two more requests were sent to mechanical turk to have other people independently verify that the video showed the litter box being cleaned adequately.

Giant Waterfall Ring Toss

An art gallery in Los Angeles wanted something as an attraction due to the pandemic, so I salvaged a 55" display, built an enclosure, and installed it in the upper glass portion of the door frame of the art gallery, and people could play the classic "Waterfall Ring Toss" game by mashing a great big button.

Remote Control Cat Toy

I built a web browser controlled remote cat toy with one of those feathers on a wand controlled by a number of servos. And also added a laser point option too. Then had a bunch of web cams live stream the adoptable cats in the shelter. And people could donate a $1 to "play the arcade game" with cats that would get unlocked as people contributed more money.

Planetarium

I built a 12 foot wide classic planetarium driven by a raspberry pi and a lot of really strong high torque servos for a science museum exhibit. Kids could use a jog shuttle dial to rotate the planetary orbits.

The Matrix Camera Capture Rig

I built a cheap camera capture rig for a science museum that works like the Bullet Time rigs, but this was done with cheap point & shoot SONY cameras. Patrons sit on a couch, or pose in a movie set, and the capture rig takes a snapshot, puts a video on the monitor for them that orbits the subjects.

Digital Sandbox RTS

A box of physical "wet sand" that you could play in, that projected an image from three overhead projectors, and you controlled a small army you could send into combat against other people playing in the sandbox. Kind of like a simple Populous game. That was on display at one of the Los Angeles kids science museums for a few years.

My town used to post our garbage pickup schedule as a photo pdf to our town's website.

They tend to change when garbage will be picked up randomly espcially near holidays, so it can be annoying and we'd end up running out in the morning when we heard the truck driving by on 'off' days

The changes always made it into the calendar at least the night before.

I wrote a horrible python abortion to grab the PDF, OCR the data, and then put it into HA so I can have HA turn a light on in my hallway the night before.

These days they make the calendar available as an iCal file so data ingest is way easier.

I wrote my own SMS gateway API with authentication tokens, quotas, rate-limits. This is because I wanted to send SMS without relying on an external API, so I got a 2€/month SIM card and plugged a USB modem (Huawei E169) into my RPi to use with Gammu. I'm using Gotify to log sent and received SMS, and send an SMS whenever my home internet is down or the IP address changes for example. It's plugged into my systems monitoring for critical alerts, and while I offered API keys to my friends, none of them wanted any so I'm the sole user.

0815??

How about a selfhostable trashmail solution

Well we all need a 100G capable firewall sometimes

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.

RemindMe! 2 days

I do work for multiple organizations and got tired of having to disconnect/reconnect VPN tunnels each time.

Solution: Raspberry Pi. It's got a single Ethernet port on it which makes it perfect. I used Openconnect since it was compatible with Cisco and PulseSecure (at the time). When you establish a tunnel, the routes come in as "kernel routes" assuming you have a split tunnel. I configured IPTables to NAT masquerade out each interface and I set up Quagga, a routing daemon to talk to my main gateway and redistributed my kernel routes into OSPF. That way, any of my devices can now access any networks they need. I did also have to configure my own DNS server since I needed to resolve the different private networks.

I was thinking OP is gonna do something like snow cooling solution thingy.... 😃😃 haha

Ugh, I think the craziest thing I do selfhosting-wise is use a full fledged project management tool as a todo list.

I need to up my game!!

I have 4 kids. I had a kid-management app running at home for a while.

It assigned chores in a rotation, including periodic chores like cleaning out the fridge which didn't need to happen every day. The kid interface had a simple green button they could click to say they'd done their chore.

When THAT happened, their fake bank allowance balance would increase.

The server side piece would track how long they were logged in and lock their screen after 30 minutes of screen time a day

The parent side included a form to track spending (decreasing their balance) and to enable and disable their user accounts on the computer. It could also grant additional screen time if needed.

The kids are older now and like hoarding cash instead of a balance, and they aren't as motivated by screen time as they used to be. So the app is no longer in use.

Would probably get more zanier responses on the Home Automation or Home Assistant subreddits.

In 2018 after deciding that I hated ProxMox, that Ganeti was dead (and it was at the time), that Harvester didn't exist yet, that OpenStack was way too complex, and that I was interested in going the Kubernetes/container route (sorry I'm still a VM guy), I decided to write my own self-hosted hyperconverged infrastructure manager. I based it on what little I knew of how Nutanix worked, with a lot of ideas from Ganeti too.

And I named it after drain pipe on a whim at Home Depot.

https://github.com/parallelvirtualcluster

5 years later I have 16 production clusters, including my own homeproduction (but not including my testing cluster), mostly through finding a niche for it with my employer, and I spend a solid 25% of my free time working on it. It's not quite at a "1.0" release I'd be comfortable with random people using yet, but it's getting close enough for me to start talking about it on social media!

The only thing slightly different that I self host is WebODM. It's open drone mapping software. You can upload 10s or 100s of photos of an area and it can generate an orthomosaic, kind of like Google maps. It has a lot of other features too.

I don't really use it, I just play with it from time to time.