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.
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.