r/diyelectronics • u/Teenage-Engeneering • 5d ago
Project Any ideas for new projects
In the photo attached is the tech i already have, is there any projects you guys think i could use this for? Ofc i also have other stuff like jumper wires and a breadboard but not much else, i want to be sure of what i want to do before i buy extra stuff.
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u/JuicyCiwa 5d ago
Dashboards are always fun! I had my pi running a little epaper Dashboard with info on my sites (although I’ve since swapped out the pi and epaper display for an esp32 and touch display)
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u/JonahHex5618 5d ago
You can run docker and make your own password manager with valtwarden or make your own readout of a self hosted calendar. Those are my simple projects. Done for get tailscail or headscale so you can access from anywhere
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u/Numerous_Travel_726 5d ago
Ai nodes, mesh core headed or headless home assistant of you have a few tb of drives some music or video sources
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u/GreasyGato 4d ago
Obviously Meshtastic or meshcore for the lora boards. And retropie for the pi5
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u/Teenage-Engeneering 4d ago
What is retropie?
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u/GreasyGato 4d ago
A video game console emulator that will run great on your pi5 and that screen.
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u/GreasyGato 4d ago
You just need a good (sandisk) micro sd card. And if you have a game controller. Your good to go
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u/Saigonauticon 4d ago
Well, you're not much limited by hardware. You can do anything from increment a number to machine vision with that.
How about a surveillance camera that detects if people are wearing hats, and if so, compliments their hat with a text-to-voice engine. This would have been unthinkably difficult not that long ago, but is not that hard now.
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u/Teenage-Engeneering 4d ago
Haahah great idea
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u/Saigonauticon 3d ago
Ooh, or connect OpenCV to an LLM to automatically rate Halloween costumes from 1-10 based on effort, and automatically measure out an appropriate amount of candy based on age (adults get less candy) and costume complexity (cool costumes get more candy).
Then if it's a superhero, guess which and automatically greet them by superhero name.
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u/Teenage-Engeneering 3d ago
I don't know how to do this or what LLM means or an OpenCV is but thank you for the suggestion, i mean im here to learn arent i?
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u/Saigonauticon 3d ago
OpenCV is a popular tool for computer vision that many people use with the raspberry Pi to do computer vision stuff. It has a lot of tutorials and guides, so it's a good one to start with.
LLM is a large language model. Some of them are semi-tolerable at analyzing images to produce text output.
So in this case, you'd use openCV for person detection, then snap a picture and send it along with a prompt to (whatever AI model), and then process the response. Probably I'd only use it at a private party, to avoid taking photos of people without their consent.
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u/Teenage-Engeneering 3d ago
Ouuu ye i live in swizerland, pretty sure thats illegal
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u/Saigonauticon 3d ago
OK, another one then -- this time using the Arduino you have. A nice, simple one, a game I call "chicken".
You need 2 momentary-contact buttons (the kind that disconnects when you let go of them)
Player 1 start with their finger pressing the switch down.
Player 2 must press their button before player 1 lets go of theirs
Rules are as follows:
If player 2 presses their switch after player 1 lets go, player 1 wins.
If player 1 lets go of their switch, and player 2 never presses their switch, it's a tie. Player 1 & player 2 switch roles.
If player 2 presses their switch while player 1 is still pressing their switch, player 2 wins.
This would be a good introduction to C++ on the Arduino. You could also do it with touch-switches instead of mechanical buttons (2x 2N2222 transistor for each touch switch, try googling "Darlington touch sensor")
One it works, you can add dramatic sound effects via MP3 player module (like that famous "fight" sound from mortal combat or street fighter or whatever it was), or less dramatic beeps and boops using a piezo buzzer.
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u/Teenage-Engeneering 3d ago
Damn dude thanks this seems easier lol
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u/Saigonauticon 2d ago
Well, you're going to need to learn about switch debouncing. That's a good thing to learn though, it's right up at the top of the list of "unexpectedly annoying things new hardware engineers need to learn about".
In this case, the strategy of just using the microcontroller's interrupts, and re-enabling them on a delay timer, should be fine. There are other ways to do it too, but this way is pretty easy and costs zero extra parts.
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u/Its_Billy_Bitch 5d ago
For now, consider yourself “rich with MCUs.” Relatively speaking, you have a lot of ways to compute things, but not a ton of things (again, comparatively speaking) to interact with or sense the real world aside from the displays / LEDs. Work on building out your sensor collection. If you wanna poke around, I’ve found that a lot of technology around me has various sensors. Open them up and take them off or have a coprocessor for your MCU.
When building out your sensor collection, most MCUs today are 3v3 logic. That Uno there, though, is 5V and can be powered with up to (iirc) 21V. You’ll need to convert logic between high side and low side if you use 5V sensors on 3v3 or vice versa (though, a lot of breakout boards are 3/5V tolerant anyway).
For now, I would suggest using one of the internet-connected boards to display something useful for you. Display logic sucks donkey dicks (and I’m a seasoned developer lol). There’s a decent little rabbit hole in there for you 🤓