Topic: Other Hobbies?
Just curious what types of hobbies the other people on this forum have.
A few of my hobbies even somewhat intersect with my Chumby addiction. More on that below!
* Jeep/Off Highway Vehicle use
* Ham Radio
* Electronics - specifically synchronizing my Christmas lights to music!
* Beer (tasting, brewing)
Ideas I've had that tie into my hobbies are as follows:
I am an avid Jeep owner and OHV enthusiast and would love to have cameras in a few locations for multiple reasons. First, self spotting on difficult runs. I'd love to have a display in the Jeep that I can see tire placement.
Another one for Jeeping: I record video on a lot of runs and would love to be able to control my GoPro cameras. I recently bought some break-out boards for that, but am not that great at SMD soldering... Those pins are small!
I'm a ham radio operator and I recently purchased a ~$20 DVB tuner that can be used as a software defined radio. I think it would be fun to have the chumby be the interface for that.
Brewing - There's already a few projects out there to do temperature control, data logging, etc. for fermentation and I think the chumby devices are a perfect platform for another. (UberFridge, Brewtroller, KegBot, etc.) Specifically the Infocast 3.5" since it has some easily accessible GPIOs for temp sensors/relays. Or put something like the MCP23017 (i2c to gpio) on the i2c bus.
Home Automation - I designed a sprinkler controller that uses a custom protocol over RS485 so my sprinklers are run by cron. I have long wanted to write a quick little UI for a chumby to be the control point of that, and in the future other home automation devices. The sprinkler controller was just the first thing I actually worked on at the time. I'm still mulling over ideas for other things.
Christmas Lights - I synchronize my lights to music. Last year was my first year and I've learned a lot about electronics. I'm an avid linux user and m$ hater, so the fact that all of the good sequencing software is windows only was a big hurdle for me. I used an old laptop last year because I didn't have enough time to finish a project I started which was to read files created from sequencing software that ran in windows and play it back on a chumby. The proof-of-concept code I had for that project is here: https://github.com/Materdaddy/BahChumbug and a demo video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD-Y0s2PzDk
To get started with all of these projects, last week I got Qt compiled and was running through some of the test/demo apps and saw the post about somebody else getting Qt going. I wish they would join this forum and contribute to all of our efforts! My plan was to make a quick/dirty UI for controlling pianobar for when Chumby's servers die, my garage C1 can still play pandora when I'm working on stuff out there.