I made some stuff in 2021
Here’s a breakdown of projects and outcomes.
Dead
Here’s all the projects I abandoned over 2021.
Statlord
This was a long-running project I used in 2019 to teach myself Django. The idea was to display a bunch of graphics across many distributed screens. It still has some canvas math that I refer to from time-to-time, but 2021 was the death knell for this project.
Giant Vending Machine
I sunk a TON of hours into this.
Imagine a giant vending machine that can vend items out of your home inventory.
That was the promise of the mechanical inventory, AKA Giant Vending Machine.
The motors, belts, etc were recycled from a 3d printer. The idea was to create many stationary “racks” (similar to the rows in a vending machine), and “spool” items off by aligning the seeker head with the stationary rack.
Eventually, issues with reliably positioning the seeker head made me give up on this project.
I’ll pick this back up if I can find a simpler hardware design!
Grafana e-paper
I rendered grafana onto a 12in epaper display using puppeteer. It only works reliably on Raspberry Pi 4’s.
Code is here, and you can buy the display here
This project died because it’s hard to accurately tell when a grafana dashboard is finished rendering. This is important, as you need to wait for puppeteer to grab a complete DOM snapshot before sending it across the wire to the epaper display.
I also swapped out grafana for Datadog in my homelab, so this project became less important.
Survived
Here are some of the interesting projects that survived
Flow rate widget
I hooked up a flow rate widget to the seltzer line on my kegerator! It has faithfully measured the amount of water I drink, and alerted me when it’s time to change kegs / lines.
The hardware is an esp32, pimoroni 240x240 1.3" lcd, and a barbed flow sensor. Code is here
Librarian
Librarian is a viewer and OCR for PDFs and images.
It also ended up being a great learning tool for a mentee learning Python + Django.
Hive
TODO - need photos
Shitbanker / pf-ingest
TODO - maybe just show UI?
Thermal printer
TODO - need photos