Side Project Ideas

I have 2 projects ongoing right now.

The first one is where I'm trying to be able to go from a picture of a top down sketch of a keyboard plate and convert it to an STL file that I can 3d print. Right now I'm still trying to figure out some of the CV stuff, and I'm still dreading generating the STL file.

The other one I'm working on is trying to build a somewhat smart reptile enclosure. The idea here is that I'll set up some temperature and humidity probes throughout some zones in the tank, as well as connect it so it can control heat sources, so that I can log and monitor the enclosure climate. Other thoughts included having some scales under the floor so I can track roughly where the animal is, reed sensors on the door so I can send an alert if it seems like it's been left open.

Not sure if either of these will actually get done, but they're interesting thoughts at least.

You can actually put the keyboard on a flatbed scanner to get the dimensions, scanners are actually 1:1, and you can then import them to CAD to sketch it.

The second one seems super cool, only advice I would give is to avoid the DHT-11 and DHT-22 humidity sensors, they have terrible drift and need constant calibration, There are better ones available these days, but are a bit more pricey.

The sensors to avoid look like this

For the keyboard, I'm making this because I just hate using CAD. It's also because the image will not necessarily be to scale, and would be inconsistently sized if it's hand drawn. Ideally I just want to take a picture, load it in, make any minor corrections, and then just magically have the file.

For the snake tank, admittedly I'm not looking too hard into component selection yet. There's a lot of software things that I want to play around with to try and wrap my brain around, but I'll keep that in mind. Thanks!