I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
I work as a software engineer and I’m also one of these people that just gets a kick out of making things. So I’d probably do some more of that, just not for an employer. Even more contributions to open source would be likely as you’ve already highlighted.
Would probably build more physical machines/contraptions/electronic doo-dads that I don’t have the time or energy to make today. That and I’d probably make more music, or more accurately, finish more music.
Probably grow more vegetables too, but currently that’s limited by space anyway.
I felt that one in my bones
art is never finished, only abandoned
If I just had one more synthesizer…
I’m very similar. I got into home automation and building custom IoT devices as part of that.
Haha we’re very similar indeed, I’ve got Pis dotted around my house doing various things, and recently jammed one of those tiny D1 mini ESP modules into a cheap IKEA air quality sensor so I could track it over time in home assistant.
Not done much more than that in terms of custom IoT devices currently, I’ve got a few more of those D1 minis left and thinking of putting one in my coffee machine (and covering it in a big blob of silicone). What have you built? I’m always open to ideas
My wife and I moved across the country and bought a 5 room bed and breakfast 2 years ago. Most of my automation and the devices I’ve created are geared towards the BnB. So lots of lights turning on and off based on time of day and whether or not we have guests. I wrote a web scraper to pull down guest data to push into Home Assistant. One of the really nice things that provides is last 4 digits of phone numbers get programmed into the front door lock and deleted when they check out. That code is here and is not terribly well organized https://github.com/chunkystyles/reservationsScraper
I created a salt tank level sensor for my water softener using a pair of Arduinos communicating over 400mhz RF. If I were redoing this one, I’d just do an ESP device. I also built a doorbell sensor that literally just has a photo resistor glued to the LED on one of the doorbell receivers. The code for both of those is here https://github.com/chunkystyles/arduinoSketches
I created touch screen controllers for mini-splits in guest rooms twice. The first version used M5 Stack Core 2 devices that was OK. The tiny screen wasn’t great. And it was programmed using M5’s visual block programming and it was a pain.
The second version is using a 3.5 inch screen and works way better. That code is here https://github.com/chunkystyles/makerfabs_hvac_remote
I have a project that I need to get started on. We have a small ice maker in our lobby and I need a device to monitor the door being left open, and whether the scoop was put back in its holder. The first part is self explanatory. The second part is because the ice refills from the top, and if someone leaves the scoop in the ice maker, it will get covered up by fresh ice. For that, I’m probably going to reuse one of the M5 Stacks and do a magnetic door sensor, and for the scoop holder a small limit switch that will trigger when the handle is in its normal place.
Man, you’re living a dream over there. As you’d expect, given I’m not running a BnB, your ideas don’t have an immediate application to my life, but damn am I impressed!
Could you tell me more about the 400mhz radios? I had a quick look at the code and it looks like you’re delegating to a transceiver module or something if I’m reading correctly
The BnB thing certainly is interesting. I like it, but it’s not what I expected.
The radios I’m using are these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09KY28VH8
I’m fairly sure the driver I’m using is this https://github.com/PaulStoffregen/RadioHead/tree/master It’s been a while since I worked on these.
So one device has an ultrasonic distance sensor and a radio transmitter. It just takes a reading and transmits is once an hour.
The other device monitors the doorbell and has the radio receiver on it. Both of those things are sent to the serial output and monitored by Node-RED.
https://imgur.com/a/SQdc95d
The transmitter and receiver aren’t terribly far apart. They’re probably like 30 feet or so, but in the basement, with walls in between them. I didn’t do any testing on how far apart they worked, but 433mhz is a pretty sturdy frequency and these have been rock solid. With the driver, they’re actually super easy to use, too.
Nice one, thanks for the detailed response! It seems like a pretty straightforward solution for simple ad-hoc connectivity. Definitely one to keep in mind
Not least of all, who knows, maybe I’ll have a BnB one day!
I’ve almost been getting upset with engineering as my career because I really enjoy doing it, but am absolutely exhausted with doing it at work that I can never bring myself to do it at home. All my hobby PCB designs or programming projects take a back seat because they require a lot of time and thought.
It really is a shame that STEM pays so highly that it may as well be a requirement if you’re not going to do trades or something with a boatload of overtime attached to it.
If I was born 100 earlier, I’m pretty sure I would have been building all sorts of crazy contraptions out of wood and metal. I would have like a collection of different mouse traps, valves, pumps, engines, turbines and all that. Instead, I have code and calculations now, but that’s ok too.