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.
The last place I lived was heated with an enormous pellet stove which would run itself out of pellets entirely before letting out an ear-splitting series of beeps and forcibly shutting off for about an hour. To avoid this, I taped an ultrasonic distance sensor to the lid of the hopper and had an ESP32 send me alerts and display the current pellet level on a little OLED.
Not a terribly dumb idea, except for the fact that ultrasonic distance sensors seem to be incredibly bad at measuring a constantly shifting mass of porous pellets. I don’t even know how many hours I spent working on an algorithm to get accurate readings, and by the time I moved out it still wasn’t quite right. I’ll also note that this pellet stove was in the living room, about 5 feet away from where I spent most of my time, and I could’ve just, ya know, got up and checked the hopper occasionally.
That’s not what we do here sir! We do not apply common sense, we find fancy automatic solutions to simple problems.