Just about all my projects are (or rather were) on github. The hidden ones are due to redditors trolling or being outright shitheads, so I had to hide some projects temporarily.

Timezone aware clocks

I have a wall of eight timezone aware clocks, with the arms controlled via stepper motors to a single raspberry pi. The Raspberry Pi also controls eight separate OLED displays that are made to emulate VFDs. And then I set each clock to the timezone it corresponds to, pull the weather and temps from the internet and send them to each display, and also show some headlines for the region. When you need to talk to a client, you know what time it is there, what the weather is like, and recent news headlines.

Chore list

I have a chore list that displays on 12"x4" touch screen, with physical electromechanical toggle switches that are controlled by a raspberry pi. This chore list reminds me to clean the litter box, water the plants, pay the car insurance, etc. When I complete a chore, I flip the physical toggle switch and the chore gets marked as done until the next time. After a while, the chore disappears from the display, and the raspberry pi releases the electromagnet and resets the physical toggle switch back to the “undone” position.

Jukebox

I have a physical jukebox I built, that mounts on the wall, that streams music from my Synology. It has a bunch of super satisfying to press clicky tactile LED illuminated arcade buttons for track select, and the track lists are shown on two 4K 12"x4" touch screens. There’s two more 1920 curved touchscreens for the marquee to show album art and for navigation. That’s a single raspberry pi controlling four separate touch screens and about 50 buttons. When you press a button to play a track, the button locks down, like on the old car radios, but the raspberry pi when switching tracks can physically retract or release the buttons too. There’s a software defined jog wheel that has an OLED display to control the volume, but the raspberry pi can turn the physical dial too. That’s wired into chatgpt, speech to text and text to speech, with cortana as the voice, and I can say things like “whatever happened to the lead singer of this band?” or “Play a random shuffle of more tracks from this year.”

Memories

18x 9" OLED screens that display a photo montage and photo gallery of family pictures all controlled by a raspberry pi.

The Wall

It’s a half-dozen salvaged OLED displays built into a false wall behind some sliding shoji screens. The displays are driven by some old piece-of-shit computer and GPU. They display nature scenes. It’s an enormous digital window.

Home Health

I have a smart dashboard that tracks my cats, phones, wallets, weather, and a bunch of other info that is displayed on an ipad by the coffee machine.

Daily Guk

It’s an old 21" android tablet that displays only good headlines, daily funny comics, weather, upcoming calendar, etc.

Cat Toy

It’s a 55" touch screen that entertains my cats. Android stick plugged into the back running some custom Unity3D games.

Walking Timer

I built a timer that tracks how long we walk, and how many laps we do around the block, and then I grab the images from the doorbell camera and use computer vision and gait analysis to automatically detects when we leave, when we return, and how many times we walked past the front door on our laps, and calculates our speed.

CNC Controller

I have a CNC controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which in turn is controlled by an Android tablet. So if the UI crashes, the CNC will continue running the gcode. This could now be replaced by other open source projects that have become available since I created this setup.

RV Sync

I have an all flash NAS at the RV which is set to automatically sync the video & music directories, and a few other directories, between my NAS at my home and the NAS in the RV so that all the contents are available when on the road, even if internet is a bit wonky.

Retired Projects

Cat Litter Robot

This was a litter box, with a Kinect, a web cam, a Fujitsu robot arm, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The robot arm was controllable via a web UI and it live streamed the litter box. When a cat did their business, the kinect detected that, weighed the litter box, and then sent a request to mechanical turk to have someone clean the litter box for 25 cents. And then when they were done, two more requests were sent to mechanical turk to have other people independently verify that the video showed the litter box being cleaned adequately.

Giant Waterfall Ring Toss

An art gallery in Los Angeles wanted something as an attraction due to the pandemic, so I salvaged a 55" display, built an enclosure, and installed it in the upper glass portion of the door frame of the art gallery, and people could play the classic “Waterfall Ring Toss” game by mashing a great big button.

Remote Control Cat Toy

I built a web browser controlled remote cat toy with one of those feathers on a wand controlled by a number of servos. And also added a laser point option too. Then had a bunch of web cams live stream the adoptable cats in the shelter. And people could donate a $1 to “play the arcade game” with cats that would get unlocked as people contributed more money.

Planetarium

I built a 12 foot wide classic planetarium driven by a raspberry pi and a lot of really strong high torque servos for a science museum exhibit. Kids could use a jog shuttle dial to rotate the planetary orbits.

The Matrix Camera Capture Rig

I built a cheap camera capture rig for a science museum that works like the Bullet Time rigs, but this was done with cheap point & shoot SONY cameras. Patrons sit on a couch, or pose in a movie set, and the capture rig takes a snapshot, puts a video on the monitor for them that orbits the subjects.

Digital Sandbox RTS

A box of physical “wet sand” that you could play in, that projected an image from three overhead projectors, and you controlled a small army you could send into combat against other people playing in the sandbox. Kind of like a simple Populous game. That was on display at one of the Los Angeles kids science museums for a few years.

“It’s connected to the network. It’s part of the lab.”

“How do you stop your wife from complaining about your homelab? I dunno, I just bought her a sewing machine and she went very quiet.”

Ohio runs my personal server in a data center. Handles email, personal websites such as justin-lloyd.com (down and to the right if you’re on desktop), offsite-backup. Texas data center is a web application server hosting a “funny pictures” website I am building in my spare time. MS SQL => Kestrel => NGINX = ATS => Android/iOS/Web/Terminal clients.

The growth has been purely organic. I cannot say any of it is really planned ahead of time. I use 16U vertical rails for each rack, and then build a cabinet around them that works for the space it is in, e.g. 32U in the cat bathroom rack, which is 16U side-by-side with another 16U. The arcade cabinet rack is 16U technically, but I only have 6U of rails in there, as the other space is pull out drawers to make it easier to work on the workstations without having to deal with cabling issues. 16U at the RV.

For permanent infra, I tend to buy new, because I want that extended warranty and am not interested in buying somebody elses problem. For projects, it is a mix of ebay finds and road-side or ewaste center salvage. I don’t watch TV, but I probably own more 55" 4K TVs than any one person I know, because I salvage them (people in big cities throw out all sorts of stuff with minor electrical faults) and then turn them into personal projects, e.g. a touchscreen cat toy, a waterfall ring toss game in the door of an art gallery, a virtual window.

Some days it feels like everything is held together with string and chewing gum.

One man’s way too much shit is another man’s enjoyable hobby.

I am working on the build log for the jukebox project. It’ll be on github eventually.

I have a $700 Tyan motherboard in my workstation. When I was moving the motherboard from one case to another, I scraped the underside of the motherboard against the metal case and broke off a number of small SMT caps and resistors. In the middle of the pandemic. In the middle of a project. So I had to jump on Amazon and have a new motherboard shipped to me next day whilst I RMA’d the damaged one. What do you say when you break your workstation motherboard in a moment of casual clumsiness? “Well… fuck!”

The jukebox is a “retro” jukebox. Wood grain, lots of tactile buttons. Two 14" 4160x1100 pixel touch screens with a vacuum fluroescent display graphic effect that shows the tracks. Click an arcade button, play that track. So it looks like those old-style jukebox devices you’d find in a diner. There are two 1920x1080 flexible touchscreens (though I have them encased so they are just permanently curved touchscreen displays), that let you navigate the full library, show album artwork, search box, etc. It’s all driven by a single Raspberry Pi with a 4TB USB SSD for storage, and everything syncs to the music directory on my Synology NAS.

Am I in deep shit? Only if I don’t clean the litter box in the “Cat Bathroom.” So the only thing that can really go wrong is the power going out. Everything else is sort of redundant, and you can route around it by moving a few cables. I guess the UDM Pro SE taking a shit would cause me some issues. Or the cable modem. Everything else, though used daily and to its fullest extent, simply means those services, e.g. music server, become temporarily unavailable. No real disasters in over 20 years. The backup Synology NAS is effectivel a fail over for essential services, e.g. adguard, but even if both synology devices are down, there’s backup DNS resolving on the UDM and also with quad9.

Is it 84 cores? 4 in the NUC, 28x2 in Storm, 28 in oh-fuck. Never really thought of it that way. I’d like some 8490H XEONs but I cannot justify it right now.

Let me deal with this train to zone, then I will bring back a bunch of guards with me that you are KoS too. :-)

Did you see “The Cauldron” too?

Today I learned. Worth investigating even if I don’t end up using it. Thanks for sharing.