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 live with a couple roommates in an apartment. For convenience we create a simple webpage where we could quickly see who’s home. It works by querying the router (running OpenWrt) every few minutes for known phones connected to the Wi-Fi. We pretty soon realized that we could actually see which room someone was in pretty consistently based on the signal strength alone.
After that it didn’t take long before we exploited it as much as we could, everything from automatically turning on the coffeemaker the first time someone left their room between 7-10am to blasting an alarm if someone left/didn’t leave their room at certain times.
This sounds like a lot of fun. You can do basically the same in Home Assistant where you can track who is home and such and do actions depending on the users state.