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Products that do what We built an appliance with Raspberry Pi that backs up from the cloud does
http://picirus.com For Startup Weekend Tulsa, we created a small low-power appliance (built on Raspberry Pi) that you connect to your different cloud accounts -- Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, etc. -- and it downloads a copy of all your stuff every night. I was thinking about all the people I love who share directly to the cloud, without a lot of planning for the case where their Facebook account gets hacked, their Dropbox account has a glitch, or one of these services they love goes out of business suddenly some day. We had a ton of fun building Picirus during Startup Weekend. I highly…
- 1IH
2013 · madebynathan.com
- 2TB
2020 · mtlynch.io
- 3BA
Hi. I heard HN likes e-paper gadgets so I wanted to share a little side project I’ve been working on with @sqfmi. We’re building Beepberry - a portable e-paper computer for hackers, designed for chatting on Beeper. My day job is running Beeper [0], but I will always have a soft spot for building hardware. I wanted to create a ‘weekend’ device that would let me stay in touch with friends and family, without the distractions of a full smartphone. I imagined a tiny, hackable e-paper screen with a physical keyboard, powered by a Raspberry Pi, that I could use to chat around my home…and pretty…
2023 · beepberry.sqfmi.com
- 4SD
Hey fellow HN-ers, I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word). We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale. We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ If you want…
2012
- 5SA
Hello all :) I made this BBS for fun and thought you all would enjoy it. It's not perfect, but it's been a fun exercise! see it: https://asciinema.org/a/Emg6SWrXMV6cehfQxrw1GRu75 try it: ssh -p 2223 shhhbb.com host it: https://github.com/donuts-are-good/shhhbb/releases/latest why? Every year I challenge myself in some new way, this year it is to push one project per week. You might recognize my static site generator [0] or my releaser for go [1] from previous posts as one of these weekly projects. If you want to join me in doing this, it's…
2023 · donuts-are-good.github.io
- 6

- 7BA
Hello Hacker News, My co-founder and I have spent the better part of years developing a completely hackable Home Automation toolset that runs on a Raspberry Pi, or any machine running Linux. With just a Raspberry Pi and a $45 Z-Wave dongle (https://www.amazon.com/Aeotec-Z-Stick-Z-Wave-create-gateway/...), you can run a complete home automation system! Our hub will support any Z-Wave or Z-Wave plus device. We are cloud hosted service that doesn't require you to purchase any proprietary hardware. Our hub software runs on NodeJS and is completely open source. We encourage…
2018
- 8

- 9DF
Hey everyone! Last weekend I participated in a Startup Weekend (Paris, France) with a friend where we pitched a simple idea. We wanted to create a cross platform application with the easiest file-sharing experience. Drag and drop the files on the avatar of the person you want to send them to. and voila, the files are sent. During the weekend I posted on HN to get some feedback on our project and was happy to see we got some awesome feedback ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780777 ). The testing page ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/149780/Dropsend%20beta.jpg ) got more than 1200 Unique…
2012
- 10IB
I am not sure if this is fits the HN community, but I am posting it here if people are interested. This is the current iteration of the car: http://i.imgur.com/ko8YBh.jpg Details: I wrote a simple android app that streams the accelerometer data from the phone to the pi over a simple socket. The pi then uses this data to drive the DC motor and the servo motor. Tilting the phone to control the car feels very natural. In this[0] pic you can see the wifi dongle I've used. I am using Adafruit Occidental v0.2[1] as my OS because it has support for my wifi dongle. It also makes some hardware…
2012
- 11OS
Startup Weekend just started in our city and we thought we'll build a Heroku autoscaler that really works, and saves you not only from slowly building traffic but from the slashdot effect as well.<p>Those who tried out ddollar's gem (and all forks of it) or even Heroscale know that the problem's not so trivial to solve.<p>We hope people will get it, and pay a small monthly fee to save many days of inrastructure coding so they can focus on business logic instead.<p>URL is: http://scalefu.com/
2011
- 12GY
2021 · github.com
- 13

- 14OS
Hey everyone! We would like feedback on our Startup Weekend project, DropSend ( Temporary name ) Here's our pitch: We want to change the way you send files to your friends or contact. Because let's face it,sending a file by email feels really clunky and is limited by the size, Instant Messenger is slow and you need to be online and finally Dropbox while perfect for storing files, doesn't really fit this use case. With our desktop application, one click (and we mean it), is all it takes to send a file. Imagine dragging a file of any size to one edge of your computer screen and see a dock…
2012
- 15KO
My co-founder and I saved up enough money to quit our jobs 6 months ago and go full-time. We began working on, while bootstrapping, a photo sharing startup. Unfortunately, after many iterations, it wasn't working well enough and we decided to kill it. However, through that process, we conducted a lot of user tests and interviews, and realized that finding users to test is a pretty hard problem. That's why we made Gemba, Japanese for "the real place", which is a service that connects companies to testers on demand for in-person interviews. URL: http://gemba.me Would love your…
2013
- 16
- 17IW
Dec 2025 · airoboticist.blog
- 18OS
I have realized that a lot of people nowadays self-host services and set up home labs with mini racks. One major pain point I have come across personally is to quickly get health status from self-hosted services and machines, and have the ability to headlessly control my Raspberry Pi inside a mini rack. So It got me thinking about building a built-in GUI that users can easily add to their Raspberry Pi nodes in their (mini or full) racks or elsewhere. I have previously designed this GUI for an open source project I have been working on (called Ubo pod: github.com/ubopod) and decided to…
2025 · getubo.com
- 19GL
I've always dreamed about a project like that when looking at status boards at other companies. We finally had the time to do our own. Here are some photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robert_olejnik/sets/72157633736087905/ The stack: Django, mustache.js, Chart.js, Bootstrap and custom Supybot plugin. Maybe will be inspiration for someone else ;-) Do you guys have similar status boards? Cheers, Robert.
2013
- 20HN
Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…
2011
- 21MI
As you can tell, it's heavily influenced by Mark Bao's threewords.me. The concept is simple, upload three pics and let your friends vote on them. In fact, I think I may have ripped the concept off a post about threewords.me. Anyways... Basically, I just wanted to build something stripped down to a core functionality and a little different from my usual projects. I've spent a lot of time polishing the flow and trying to make sharing an inherent part of the app. It's built on Ruby/Padrino/Sinatra, Postgres and uses S3 for image hosting. This is actually my first Ruby project coming from a pure…
2011
- 22MW
I always find myself frustrated by how many steps I have to take to video chat with someone online. There's always too much software to download and install, and too many accounts to remember. The high-end, high-price Cisco conferencing systems I've used are especially fragile. So I built Vidless in a weekend for myself, and I hope you find it useful too. Just create a room and share the link, and you'll be chatting in seconds. You can invite several people (I haven't really tested a max yet), and chats on Vidless are always private. Enjoy!
2012 · vidless.com
- 23NP
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
- 24IB
Hey HN! I’m a Product Manager and made a DIY doggy cam (using Claude and a Raspberry Pi) to help train my dog with separation anxiety. I wrote up a blog post sharing my experience building this project with AI.
Nov 2025 · github.com
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