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.
My town used to post our garbage pickup schedule as a photo pdf to our town’s website.
They tend to change when garbage will be picked up randomly espcially near holidays, so it can be annoying and we’d end up running out in the morning when we heard the truck driving by on ‘off’ days
The changes always made it into the calendar at least the night before.
I wrote a horrible python abortion to grab the PDF, OCR the data, and then put it into HA so I can have HA turn a light on in my hallway the night before.
These days they make the calendar available as an iCal file so data ingest is way easier.
At least they improved their system and didn’t just continue with their image!