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.
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’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”.