Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I turned algae into a bio-altimeter and put it on a weather balloon
Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…
StratoSpore is a high-altitude research payload that uses algae fluorescence to estimate altitude. Designed and launched by a high school student, the system combines a spectral sensor and Raspberry Pi with a trained… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi everyone! Shortly after publishing my iOS 4 jailbreak last October[1], I got to work on my next hobby project: a from-scratch homebrew GPS receiver, which can solve the user’s location solely from billions of radio antenna samples. I took a commodity SDR (alongside the Python standard library and numpy) and built a signal processing pipeline that can detect and track GPS satellites over many minutes, drop and pick up satellites as they come in and out of view, and precisely determine the user’s position and clock inaccuracy. All told, gypsum can go from a cold start to a fix on the user’s…
2024 · axleos.com · its alternatives →
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Hi all, I'm excited to announce Stratoshark, a sibling application to Wireshark that lets you capture and analyze process activity (system calls) and log messages in the same way that Wireshark lets you capture and analyze network packets. If you would like to try it out you can download installers for Windows and macOS and source code for all platforms at https://stratoshark.org. AMA: I'm the goofball whose name is at the top of the "About" box in both applications, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.
2025 · stratoshark.org · its alternatives →
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Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…
2024 · paulbupejr.com · its alternatives →
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Me and a few friends made this design document as part of our entry to the UK CanSat competition where a high school team is required to build a probe to be launched. The probe must serve some purpose, and ours was to map the temperature and pressure of the air at different altitudes. We had the opportunity to launch it a week ago and you can find the video of our launch here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16bsLzxjP7OWRqVvCB62cLv7QYLR... During the launch we reached 400m above sea level, and the can pulled 70gs successfully. The parachute and can stayed intact.…
2025 · drive.google.com · its alternatives →
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A monitoring station for carnivorous flora. Contribute to blackrabbit17/xenolab development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6OA
Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere. Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html
Feb 2026 · octosphere.social · its alternatives →
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A common open source approach to observability will begin with databases and visualizations for telemetry - Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger. But observability doesn’t begin and end here: these tools require configuration, dashboard customization, and may not actually pinpoint the data you need to mitigate system risks. Coroot was designed to solve the problem of manual, time-consuming observability analysis: it handles the full observability journey — from collecting telemetry to turning it into actionable insights. We also strongly believe that simple observability should be an innovation…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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RadianceKit▲95Turn photos into 3D Gaussian Splats on your Mac
Jun 2026 · radiancekit.de · its alternatives →
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I ported Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 (4B parameter image-to-3D model) to run on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS. The original requires CUDA with flash_attn, nvdiffrast, and custom sparse convolution kernels: none of which work on Mac. I replaced the CUDA-specific ops with pure-PyTorch alternatives: a gather-scatter sparse 3D convolution, SDPA attention for sparse transformers, and a Python-based mesh extraction replacing CUDA hashmap operations. Total changes are a few hundred lines across 9 files. Generates ~400K vertex meshes from single photos in about 3.5 minutes on M4 Pro (24GB). Not as fast as…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PixelSpace▲68A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system
2014 · joshworth.com · its alternatives →
- 11RT
LiveSplat is a system for turning RGBD camera streams into Gaussian splat scenes in real-time. The system works by passing all the RGBD frames into a feed forward neural net that outputs the current scene as Gaussian splats. These splats are then rendered in real-time. I've put together a demo video at the link above.
2025 · its alternatives →
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CO₂ & Temperature monitor. Contribute to larsp/co2monitor development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Renders black hole gravitational lensing effects in an image canvas using WebGL, glfx.js, and numeric.js - cliffcrosland/black-hole.js
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Cloud rental system for crypto mining farms
2018 · stratumsphere.io · its alternatives →
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Haskell re-implementation of STOKE, the stochastic superoptimizer - blaze/notebooks/tutorial.ipynb at master · bollu/blaze
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I've been working on this for a while now, and I'm happy to share! I've been into launching weather balloons for a few years. One aspect of the hobby that really drew me in was the tracking side of things. Tracking systems let you follow the balloon's position throughout the flight and, most importantly, know exactly where it lands so you can recover the instrumentation. APRS is what I started out using during my first few years in the hobby, after I got my amateur radio license in 2020 (W0MXX). I designed a few small boards using the trackuino…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey guys, A couple weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen, China for a hackathon and on the first day, we all used the one-day PCB fabrication to make PCB badges to wear during the event. I decided to go a little crazy and make some cool 3D alchemical-cosmological badges. It's 3 PCB's stacked on-top of each other that's connected using testpoints on each board. The innerboard has a 10 cent CH32V003 MCU that powers the WS2812B neopixels on the outer rings using the testpoints and shines through using exposed soldermask. If you have any questions about how the design works, feel free to let me know!
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19MI
2014 · gonimb.us · its alternatives →
- 20UA
2015 · willmcgugan.com · its alternatives →
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2021 · cselab.github.io · its alternatives →
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🎈 👽 🛸 Weather balloon to the stratosphere with a Raspberry Pi - stratopi-org/stratopi
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I built depthviz, an open-source CLI tool that generates depth & time overlay videos from dive logs. It supports dive computers (Garmin, Suunto, Shearwater, Apnealizer) and manual input for freedivers who want to enhance their footage with real-time dive data. Why I Built It: Adding dive data to videos manually is tedious. depthviz automates this by reading dive logs (.fit, .csv, .xml) from various sources, generating an overlay video with real-time depth, allowing full customization (fonts, colors, depth smoothing, stroke width), and running on Windows, macOS, and Linux. How It…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I saw a tweet that tinygrad is so good that you could make a graphics library that wraps tg. So I’ve been hacking on a gtinygrad, and honestly it convinced me it could be used for legit research. The JIT + tensor model ends up being a really nice way to express light transport all in simple python, so I reimplemented some new research papers from SIGGRAPH like REstir PG and SZ and it just works. instead of complicated cpp its just a 200 LOC of python.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing alternatives
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