Are you working on any tech-related personal projects right now?

I program websites (my most recent / favorite https://ral.space) but I'm curious what you all do!

Also, is there any point that you've ever turned your hobby into a job? I'm considering doing that but I feel like it will ruin my hobby for me. . . any advice?

1/21/2018 3:26:03 AM

the only tech-related personal project I have right now is hoarding lots of old computer equipment from the 1990s.. I'd like to get a bunch of old equipment (including Sun/SGI) online and have a private computer history museum

1/21/2018 12:12:26 PM

I was mining out of an old computer but just purchased an xw8400 workstation and a cd holder from goodwill that I will mod into a neat, low profile mining rig. waiting for the graphics cards to show up at the end of the month.

1/21/2018 12:46:00 PM

Recently, I've been learning about electronics and how to roll my own PCBs.

1/21/2018 1:56:10 PM

Ive been planning on starting a few.

I would love to get a Pi-Hole running. I have a few RPi laying about doing nothing.
(sorry for the toxic link.. but Pi-hole's site leaves something to be desired in explaining what it does and how it works)
https://lifehacker.com/create-a-network-wide-ad-blocker-with-a-raspberry-pi-1727295925

Also, I have another RPi that was running my beer fermentation chamber before I moved. Its been 2 years, and I haven't brewed since I moved. Its time to start again, I bought some stuff to make Apfelwein today, so I need to get it going again. Hopefully its plug and play since It hasn't changed, but I have terrible luck getting RPi to work reliably.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/howto-make-a-brewpi-fermentation-controller-for-cheap.466106/

Finally, I have been learning a bit about CANBUS in cars. In my race car I have a Megasquirt (MS2PNP) and a AIM MLX2 dash, which communicate by CAN. Im hoping to add a "node" to this canbus and start transmitting it in realtime through a cellular connection to a base-station, so I can have realtime telemetry (I mainly want accurate fuel consumption data). I will need to take Injector Duty-cycle information and use that to calculate an approx. fuel burn rate, then subtract from my estimated total (63 liters). I imagine there will be some "calibration" fudge factor in getting this to work.

1/21/2018 7:39:53 PM

Most of my personal projects are hedonistic, but I built a website last year for figuring out how to get specific date formats for SQL Server queries so people at work would stop asking me for help: https://www.sqldates.com/

It's ugly, it leans on JavaScript libraries, and it probably has a lot of bugs. But it's live, it works, and it has repeat users.

1/22/2018 6:31:16 AM

Recently repurposed an old rig to turn it into a Plex Media server. Ripped and stored my whole disc movie collection and dontated the discs

1/22/2018 5:17:43 PM

I used to do cool shit with technology. But after working 50+ hours a week with enterprise level tech I pretty much lost interest in doing anything at home. But back in the day before you could buy them everywhere I would build digital picture frames out of old laptops. I made a few different models. Some would boot off a CD, some off a usb stick. Some had wireless so I could log in and change the pics or even open a browser full screen to the current weather radar/sports scores/etc. I would strip down the laptop to the bare essentials and mount it in a shadow box picture frame.

1/22/2018 8:48:36 PM

Quote :

"Recently, I've been learning about electronics and how to roll my own PCBs."

I've been doing the same thing. For Halloween I made some eyes to put in the bushes around the house. The LED eyes fade in, blink a few times, and fade out. I wrote an 8-bit random number generator to vary the number of blinks, time between blinks, etc. so there's no obvious pattern and different sets of eyes don't appear synchronized. It's really just a glorified blinky-LED, but it was fun and I'm happy with how it turned out.

1/25/2018 12:23:09 AM

The construction looks nice and tidy. Did you panalize that yourself do did the manufacturer do that for you? What's the IC?

1/25/2018 3:24:59 PM

Thanks. I laid the board out in KiCad, had it manufactured by OSH Park, and populated it myself. OSH Park panelizes all their orders--that's their thing for doing cheap, low-volume runs.

The IC is an ATtiny85.

1/25/2018 4:30:50 PM

I used PCBWay. Unless you need the gold coating, they're cheaper then OSHPark. They might even be cheaper with the gold coating depending on the details.

I had a good experience with them but I will probably opt for the DHL shipping next time. The cheap, slow-boat-from-China shipping took 30 days from order to delivery. Most folks report order to delivery times of less than a week with the DHL service.

https://www.pcbway.com/setinvite.aspx?inviteid=58282

The affiliate link should give you a $5 credit and me a kick back.

1/25/2018 4:44:13 PM

2/9/2018 11:26:03 AM

Quote :

"I would love to get a Pi-Hole running. I have a few RPi laying about doing nothing."

honestly unless it's an pi 3 it's not going to be sufficient for most networks, in terms of resources needed. I personally run my pihole on a vagrant vm. i tried setting it up with docker, but i didn't want to give up port 80 on my main desktop.

2/15/2018 8:29:17 PM