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 love custom HA work flows that are specific to ones needs. Great job! Show’s the beauty of HA that most people miss when all they do is the standard stuff, but you can basically do anything you can imagine. I have door sensors and instead of only relying on a baby monitor, when my toddlers open their door after 2200, the lights turn on in the hallways (so they see something) and a light in our bedroom turns on as well as a notification on the phone. Because sometimes toddlers are sneaky and you hear nothing on the baby monitor. Set this up after I heard one of them cry two floors down (he went through the entire dark house alone down two flights of stairs).
A former colleague of mine had an even more advanced version of this. Since his dog is chipped, and the chip is RFID, he hooked up an RFID reader to an Arduino, and built a dog door with a motor that automatically opens when his, and only his, dog is there, and sends him a notification.
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”.