I've done a couple things with them but never really anything that I couldn't solve with a normal computer. They are just cheap and lightweight which is fun. I practiced deploying docker images to one that ran an elasticsearch cluster and used an Arduino board to collect and send temperature data to the cluster. You can also turn them into little arcade or media centers (I tried using mine as a SteamLink but it didn't work too well over WiFi). I think it would be cool to hook one up to collect data and automate my aquaponics tank but from what I've found the tank is already pretty self sufficient so I might save that project for a normal fish tank someday. My next project will most likely be to use one to make one of those "magic mirrors" that displays an interface behind a one way mirror. I think that would be a fun project that takes advantage of the compactness of the pi.

I was thinking about starting with the magic mirror stuff. Seems neat

Cool! Let me know if you find any good resources.

I setup a gitlab server (does basic CI/CD) and media center. minimal hardware lol

I have - i believe i used google domains service to register and then they linked me to a hosting service and it’s all under my gmail account

not sure about the price difference - i did it mainly because i’m lazy

That sounds pretty convenient. I’ll take a look at that too - never heard of it. Thanks tia!

keeninvye.com baby

swag keenin

gotta throw some content up on there Keenin 😛

Nice site keenin very cool

lol yea, I just snagged the domain and haven't done anything with it

Trying to understand the goal better… Is the vpn server one of the side projects you want running on the pi?

I can definitely explain the end-goal a bit more. I'm trying to create a server to house all of my side projects and allow them to be accessible from anywhere. My early ideas are along the lines of accessing one port to navigate to a chatroom, another port to navigate to an editable to-do list, and any number of other practice projects on other ports. My thoughts specifically behind the vpn server were that I wanted something to allow secure access to our private home network while we work on the projects, but I'd eventually like to make it semi- or fully-public if I wish to add a domain name to it and provide it to potential employers or something along those lines. Like I said, this is all new to me, so I'm really not sure what the best setup is. The vpn server just sounded like the best course to take, but I'm sure somebody more knowledgeable on the subject may disagree. Does that clarify my intentions a bit?

Generally, sounds pretty cool. I don’t know anything about setting up a vpn server unfortunately. Have you tried setting up a simple web service (e.g. a hello world springboot app) first? Might be simpler to get started and be a stepping stone to something more complex like vpn server.

I haven't. That's not a bad idea though. I just had the security of the connection at the front of my mind so I went straight to vpn server. But, I'm sure it would be secure enough without being a vpn server. I just don't know a whole lot about network security and didn't want to unknowingly cause any vulnerabilities as I was messing around with stuff.

I've setup a basic webserver and other projects that can be accessed via PI-IP:PORT, but no VPN. A cursory google search shows some easy VPNs to setup.
VPN:

Did you use any specific programs or guides for your web server?

I used piVPN for the VPN server which made the initial set up pretty easy

Ryan can you let us know what you end up doing? I also have a pi sitting around and your project sounds useful. Hope to learn from your work!

Instead of going the vpn route you could just set up a web server that required the user to log in. Then you could create accounts for different people and each of them could have their own permissions and everything. I don't think a vpn is really the security solution in this case.

But, I could be wrong. I've never hosted a web service on a home network before. With your student status you might be able to get some sweet student perks from AWS or Azure which might give you free allowance to host a web service in the cloud. That could be a cool alternative which would also get you some experience working with a cloud provider.

Definitely collect this student pack from GitHub if you haven't already. It's got tons of value!

+1 to cloud providers. Good experience. I wouldn’t discard doing this on your own hardware for the better understanding, though. I’ve never done that and I wish I have to better understand the lower level details. I’d do both.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I think there are different learnings to be gained from both.

I have the basic Wyze Cam:

It sits in the main room of our house pointed at the door and sees most of the living room. I rarely actually look at it. I used to look at it much more when our cats were younger and we were leaving them at home. I mainly use it when I am on vacation. It's nice for that sort of thing. I'd recommend getting an SD card for it to continuously record to local storage. Without an SD card, it records "events" which are triggered based on sound and/movement and stores these events in the cloud. The cloud being some servers in China.

For $25 it's a great simple home camera. I'm sure someone wiser with more knowledge of connected devices could list any cons it has w.r.t networking.

I love my Wyze Cam. I have two; one for my front door and one for my living room/porch/patio.

I have mine without SD cards and it just records events at my front door. Works well for my needs (see who is at my front door/passing by).

Awesome, thanks guys! Glad to hear you're still liking them.

@keenin, @andelink Do you have the standard or the pan?

I have the standard. I think @brandon has the pan.

Yeah, I have two of the pan ones. I'll just echo what these guys already said. They are nice to have for sure.

@brandon Pan vs. original? Worth the extra $10 for the pan?

Yeah, I think it's probably worth it. It's a nice to have. The original is more compact though.

After seeing how you can use the Pan, I wish I bought that instead. The size difference isn’t much imo, but of course depend on your set up

None with wyze, but I’m interested in hearing others ideas!! Christmas lights have been my best use-case for automation so far

@andelink What automation do you have set up for your christmas lights?
How about you guys @brandon @keenin?

They turn on at 6am. They turn off whenever I leave home. They turn on whenever I get home. They turn off at 11pm or whenever I go to bed. Use IFTTT location for arrival/departure triggers.

That is awesome! Am I guessing correctly that the IFTTT app knows your phone location?

Yep!

I might do something like that for my camera. Have it turn on when I leave and visa versa.

I don't have any automation like that set up right now. I just have a camera facing the front door and one as a cat cam.

My first one is acting as a cat cam for now. I already know I will get another one soon haha, which I will use as more of a security cam. It’s a bit addicting! haha

Yeah, they are fun and cheap!

@keenin @r.taylor @brandon @spkaplan

Slick readme!

Thank you! Scrapped that together for you guys this morning lol

Forgot to mention that you'll need to checkout my golinks branch to try it out as I haven't merged the PR yet

I have always wished it was easier to nagivate bookmarks with keyboard. Golinks seems like it would kind of satisfy that desire

Yes! I didn't think about it until using them here at Lyft. I guess they started at google and now have spread to a lot of other bay area companies. I'm a very very big user. Found myself wishing I had them in my personal life but sadly learned they weren't available out-of-the-box for personal use-cases. Thus, my attempt

Microsoft has a version of this too and you are right, it's awesome. I can usually guess the shortcut I need based on the situation.
aka.ms/store
aka.ms/benefits
etc

I hadn't thought of making one for myself though. I can't believe that's not already a thing. Your extensions going to be a hot commodity!

Each game has so much textttttt

I feel like they're shorter than most leetcode problems

The first one at least

Yeah well I don’t do those either lol

No wonder you aren't l33t

Lol idk what that means

My life is over

I was gthinking about that this morning and was like, was he getting "Gal Gadot" the actor mixed up with "Godot"? 😂

But yea, I took a. look at it a bit this morning

Godot is great for 2d games, but not so much for 3d. Unity still has more features all around, but I think Godot has a much easier programming language (very similar to python) and can quickly create prototypes

Haha I did think it was spelled like the actor, but thought maybe it was just a coincidence or named after them or something 🤷‍♂️

Curious to hear why you compare it to Unity in particular. Is it just because it's the other platform that you have experience with, or is there something else that makes them comparable?

It's because it's the current engine I'm in to. When I was using GameMaker I compared everything to that. The other comparable thing is just that they are both strong 2D game engines.

@r.taylor i feel like you would like a lot of these

My grandmother has dementia. About twice a day, she calls my parents every 5 minutes, forgetting that she just hung up. The calls are always the same: “You live there now. Yes you have money. We came to visit you yesterday.” This can go on for an hour or so.
My parents are incredibly patient, but after a couple of these calls, they’ll just leave the phone to ring. The soundtrack of the phone constantly ringing in the house, and the guilt associated with not picking up, is unbearable.
My brother and I built a system where her calls get re-routed to a rotation of relatives to answer her calls, to spread the load. After a call with her, each person gets a 2 hour break (customizable). If no one is available to answer, or if everyone is on break, she gets a voicemail that my dad recorded that explains that we love her, that she lives there, all the usual stuff.
It’s working beautifully.

For 6 years I had a long distance relationship between Peru and Germany.
When you are in different timezones it can actually be nice to fall asleep with the other person “close” to you; so we kept Skype running while one of us went to bed and the other person was working on the PC.
Unfortunately the internet connection would regularly drop, ending the Skype call. Now you did not want to wake the other person by calling them.
So I wrote a small script that would allow you to send a secret word in the chat and invoke the other persons’ Skype to call you instead automatically.
Kept our relationship healthy. Now we’ve been married for nearly 10 years and are happily living together :)

I built myself an automated hydroponic grow tent.
It measures and corrects pH, electrical conductivity, oxidation reduction potential, temperature of the air and water, water level, and humidity. It also automates pumps, lights, and fans (I know people normally advise against this). None of it is particularly sophisticated, but I’m really proud of it.
I initially used a deep water culture and later moved on to the nutrient film technique. It produces a lot of greens and herbs — way more than I ever expected — and it’s remarkably hands off. I recently left it to do its thing for almost 3 months before I had to intervene, and the problem wasn’t the water, nutrients, or the system failing explicitly. The plants just got too big for their channels and as they became stressed, they developed some pest issues. It was such a cool and empowering experience to see real world automation Just Work.
The whole thing is powered by an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. It’s a great little controller.
I’m currently designing my first PCB to consolidate the system onto a single board so my friends can easily build their own. It’s not extremely cheap, but it’s not too expensive either and you get a tremendous amount of food from it. It’s such a fun hobby.

some gpt fun

I just moved to the bay area. I made an app that scrapes all bay area events from meetup, eventbrite, and a couple of other sites- This way you end up with around 100 events a day, way too much to read through.
So next I take each event, send it to chatgpt3.5 and ask it to rate this event on around 20 parameters. Next, I take the latitude/longitude of each event and measure driving distance from my house. Then I have a master formula based on my personal interests and driving preferences and an app shows me the 10 events every day most likely to be interesting to me for any day.

can’t overstate how valuable this would be for cats

Every night, at 3 AM, my cat will meow and paw at the bedroom door like a banshee. I tried everything to get him to stop, including the off-the-shelf air sprayers that trigger with motion.
Eventually, I decided to build my own. I 3D printed a case and trigger for an air sprayer can, created some electronics with an ESP32 and RF trigger, and wrote my own “motion detection” logic - this time with an ultrasonic sensor, which works much better in the dark.
Now, the cat knows that a meow or paw will get him sprayed, and my wife and I can finally sleep!
I also built an air filtration system for my 3D printer, a level checker for my water softener, and a custom keepsake box that only opens with an RFID chip that you can read more about on my blog:

LOL

I trained the raccoons that visit my house at night. I started them out getting a peanuts from a water bottle. Then I tied the bottle to a rope. Then kept raising the bottle higher. At that point, I built an automated feeder system using a linear actuator activated by pulling the rope with the bottle attached. It had LEDs that were green / red to show when the feeder would / wouldn’t dispense peanuts. It was all driven by an ESP32, it even had a web page on our LAN reporting how many correct / incorrect pulls were done. Over the coarse of a few nights they figured it out. Raccoons are so cool.

Winner!

I built a custom smart motorized masturbator.
It borrows from 3D printer design, and has a NEMA 17 stepper motor driving a 2GT belt loop around a short length of 2020 extrusion to slide a carriage along a linear rail. The carriage has attachment points that I’ve put clamps on, that close around a fleshlight-style sheath. There’s a brace at the business end that you put around the base of the penis and it keeps everything aligned.
All the parts are custom-designed and 3d printed.
It has an outboard control box that contains:

  - an ESP32-based microcontroller with a small OLED screen. 
  - a clickable rotary encoder that is the single input control
  - a TMC2209 stepper driver
  - 12v power input and a buck converter to feed the esp32
  - 12v output ports for 2 additional vibrators and an an H-bridge module to control them
The simple UI allows full control over the motion:  - stroke duration
  - stroke amplitude
  - offset from the 0 position
  - motion path (just sinusoidal vs triangle wave so far)

The controls also allow control over the secondary vibrators for intensity, rhythm, and duty cycle.
It’s been evolving for a couple years now and it works brilliantly!

A website to see a map of the world’s tides, and bidirectional predictions for individual stations (edit: worldwide too, forgot I added that). The UI/UX is... archaic, but that’s just how I wanted it. It works fully offline.
Most fun part was transcribing 70+ year old NOAA tide calculation mathematic/astronomic/hydrologic research papers into modern TypeScript. Approach is semi-documented here:

lol

a single line of code I wrote which frequently gives me great joy. In zsh you can define a function called commandnotfound_handler which gets invoked whenever a command ... isn’t found.
Mine says: figlet lol, $@, so whenever you make a typo like “gits status” or something, you get a big “lol, gits tatus” printed out, which is amusing.

Wow, that guy went hard on the research phase haha fun stuff!

I love to see this stuff too. I think we need more folks from industry, or retired, teaching in schools or after school clubs. If it wasn't for the 1 CS class in my high school, I might have not known about CS at all.

Hmm so true. The only tech related class I ever took in high school was typing class. Which I heard they’re not teaching more - don’t quote me on that though. My WPM is the thing I’m most proud of 😆

I think CS in high school is becoming more common. I was talking to… someone… and they were saying it’s growing. I like the idea of non-school related but I don’t know how practical that is. I feel like working adults have no time, and school age kids all seem to have no time, or at least it seems like activities activities activities are the priority of parents. Maybe that changes as kids get older

Yeah, I think it is becoming more common as well. Totally agree about non-school, plus then you have to know about it to sign up or whatever. If it's an elective in school, then it's right in your face as an option when signing up for classes.

I gotta try this out! Wish I could try it out on a work repo that I already know well

I know, the private repos are always the road block with these sorts of things

lol fun