I think making an āusableā phone (especially one that is able to make calls, etc.) yourself is extremely hard to do, if not impossible.
Many ātinkerā-phone startups/ devices, like PinePhone or Librem, who made the phones from scratch or mostly themselves afaik, had huge problems in the beginning with basic functions, like making calls.
Thereās a project (mainly for kids and students) somewhere to make E-readers themselves, maybe you can start with that?
Iāll link it to you if I found it.
That might act as a base.
If you want a good phone that gives off DIY-vibes (modularity, repairability, etc.) but want something proper and modern, then check out Fairphone. Afaik, the FP4 also supports PostmarketOS and other mobile distros.
Remember to take everything I said with a huge grin of salt, since Iām not that well informed in that area of DIY- or Linux phones. A lot of what I said might be wrong, take it only as idea or starting point.
But if you really want to start this project, good luck. Youāll need it š«
To add, in the US, most service providers will not let a device on their network until it has gone through FCC approval. You can get around this by buying a cell module, which has gone through approval, but most of those are data only last I looked.
Fairphone especially is such an attractive option to me but the thing is that it is a dream to me to build my own smartphone, one that truly is mine . But this gives me an idea I have seen videos of people building cyberdecks from framework laptop parts, makes me wonder if I could do such a thing with fairphone parts.
I feel you man. Letās not forget about hacked up electricity, shoddy repairs from the previous owners, lower building standards back then and other surprises that make a somewhat doable project turn full teardown.
Please please please go through and double check wiring and housing for your light fixtures if you havenāt. Weāve been here a while and have been renovating as weāre able to afford to (thereās a reason we bought an older house) but that was one of the first things we did and there were nightmares hidden in the ceiling
One of our friends found that wall severely browned and crisped behind the oven after it was improperly installed for decades, lol. Terrifying wiring mistakes too, the type that make your hair stand on end. They were remodeling after bad water damage and found all sorts of terrible surprises.
We had a mold issue stemming from a shower vent not connecting to the roof and just dumping humid air into the attic so we wanted to fix that. Found rotten newspaper from the late 40s as insulation mixed with vermiculite under a thin layer of cellulose, which we treated as asbestos and had that professionally removed. Under that found a whole spiderweb of live knob and tube which wasnāt connected to any devices, was disconnected from many of its knobs, and was missing insulation in many places while it was draped loosely over some metal plumbing up there.
The project started as a disconnected shower vent causing mold, and ended up with a whole rewire of the lighting and outlet circuits in the house. Wild stuff.
We were also swapping out the breakers for ones up to code since we had messed with the circuits, and one a/gfci breaker just kept tripping. Found a light fixture that had evidentially been sparking away up there for who knows how long.
Feels really good to have had eyes on every box in the house and know that whatās there now is leagues safer than what was there before.
Not sure if thereās a specific grease to use, but Iād imagine any relatively high viscosity grease should suffice. Maybe someone else can recommend something more specific/appropriate than āaxle greaseā.
Might as well replace the belt while youāve got it apart. The way my luck goes, Iād get it all back in business and the belt would snap.
Just got a bunch of stuff delivered to build my own hyperhdr tv backlight. Its a relatively small project, but im hoping itll have a huge impact on my viewing experience š
Ooo is there a guide you are following for this? I tried setting this up a few years back during covid and never could get it working right. I still think it was faulty hardware but I went through at least a half-dozen grabbers.
Yeah, there is a guide for the raspberry raspberrypi.com/ā¦/raspberry-pi-tv-ambient-lightinā¦I donk know if hyperhdr would run on weaker, more readily available hardware than the pi 3. ive seen some YouTuber (dont remember who) use Hyperion with a Pico, but here was noticable delay. Since hyperhdr is a more optimised fork of hyperion intended for 4k content, the pico may be able to to run hyperhdr for 1080p content, but im not willing to take that risk. Also check what kind of power supplies you can even get. 5v 15a power supplies apparently donāt exist in Germany, so i had to use 30 led/meter strips instead of 60
Awesome, thanks! I may dive back into this project again since I would still really like to do it. I think I actually have a spare Pi 4 around here somewhere that I got for my 3d printers but ended up swapping that to a thin client. Appreciate it!
Iāll preface with my qualifications, so if a more qualified person comes along you can disregard me. Iām an engineer who has taken a few thermodynamics courses and has worked as an engineer for a hvac manufacturing plant. Iāve never done anything strictly related to geothermal, but Iāve read a decent bit about it (and watched Technology Connectionsā video on the subject, itās a good entry point)
You may want to call up a company who does geothermal cooling and see what options you have, theyāve gotten pretty creative on how to bury the cooling lines. (See the video mentioned before)
Going the route of just sticking a large water tank underground probably wonāt do a ton. I expect that you will have a poor surface to volume ratio, which means poor heat transfer, which means youāll saturate your thermal mass fairly quickly. What this may allow you to do is run your HVAC system during the night/morning when itās much more efficient, and āchargeā your thermal mass for the hottest part of the day.
Assuming you use 300kg of water in a day, and you can get a 10Ā°C delta, my very rough back of the napkin math says youāre only going to have about 3 kWh of cooling from just the cold water, which is a decent bit, but itās not a ton. Best case scenario you cut your cooling needs by around 10-20%.
Iām too lazy to do the math of the heat exhange with the ground, but my bet would be youāre better off spending any money you have set aside for this on better insulation techniques and/or a proper geothermal cooling system.
Thanks, hoping that your back of the napkin math is in the correct ballpark, 10-20% lowering of cooling bills sounds very lucrative to me.
And I owe a clarification after reading your analysis since Iām not hoping to achieve any geothermal gains by heat transfer between water tank and ground. Iām assuming that the water will heat up as it cools the room down. But since fresh water is supplied periodically and this fresh water is relatively cool, it will keep the cooling cycle running. I will try to build the tank in shade and isolated from direct heat of the sun as far as possible.
As regards your point on the budget, i donāt think that two car radiators, some insulated tube and a small water pump will cost much, more so if I can run the pump off a small solar panel in the day time.
All said and done, if there is nothing in theory that advises me against trying this, i would like to give it a shot and document it so that someone else might learn from it.
Engineers describe heat transfer with a āheat transfer coefficientā, and the rate of heat transfer is this coefficient multiplied by the temperature difference. So you can calculate what the heat transfer coefficient must be by measuring room air temperature initially, water temperature initially, and then running your system for a little while and measuring the room temperature again. The smaller room area you can cool the more accurate this will be. You will need to look up heat capacity and density of air (easy to find), and the temperature change of the air with the volume of the room and the temperature change will together give you an amount of heat you removed from the air to the water. Simple!
While I have a background in science, this is not the specialization i chose and so almost all of it is almost Spanish (wonāt say Greek, since at least Iāve heard of the words) to me.
I thank you for summarising the science of it though. It gives me enough keywords to start learning.
Well there is plenty of reason to not do it, but Iām assuming youāve thought about what tampering with your water supply means (and that car radiators are not food safe, and could contain lead or other nasty metals). I think it goes without saying youāre also running the risk of leaks, a high water bill, and mornings without water if your system has issues.
Iād also like to cover my ass a little and do the typical engineer thing and remind you that an idealized number like this is never realized. You will have to account for losses due to inadvertent and incomplete heat transfer. But you may also get a higher reduction due to the ground heat exhange, which I am still too lazy to work out. ĀÆā \ā ā (ā ćā )ā ā /ā ĀÆ
All of that said, I really hope you succeed at getting cheaper cooling and have fun doing it. There are houses which use water piped through concrete flooring to regulate temperature, so youāre not very far in uncharted territory. Doing big projects like this are also a really good way to learn a lot very quickly.
I also still highly recommend getting a quote for a reputable geothermal cooling system. If nothing else but to brag about how much you saved by DIYing
I donāt know the first thing about building stairs but I can tell you what Iād do to learn: not use YouTube or social media as a primary source for learning.
You should go to the library and find a book or five that talk about stairs, including basic principles. Maybe buy one of your favorite books or use that information to find one online.
This is major structural work on your home. You can cause a bunch of damage and expose yourself to uninsurable liability if you do it wrong. Unlike many other projects, you canāt necessarily redo a wrong turn you take here without substantial investment. If you donāt have someone you 100% trust to build stairs themselves watching over you, failure to adequately plan can make this a nightmare.
My gut says tapcon, but my head says youād better look up the code for that one. Deck collapses can be pretty ugly and you donāt want to have an insurance claim denied because you didnāt build to code.
What do you mean by ācleaningā the hardwood floor? What needs to be cleaned off them? Is the contractor going to sand the floors and recoat them with something? If itās just a matter of tearing up the carpets, I wouldnāt pay $2700 for that. If the floors need sanding, I absolutely would never do that myself. (source: I used to own a floor sander and realized I shouldnāt do that myself.)
Ding Ding Ding! :) Wine racks, shelves with crates for flower bulbs, potatoes and other root vegetables... Which will mean we have to secure the entry, our (lovely) elderly neighbor has already mentioned coming over at night for a drink ^^
But it will probably serve as a tool shed for the coming year until we have the rest of the garden levelled and laid out, it's the first of many projects, we will come back to it for the aesthetics (lime render, floor tiling, door, outside cladding...).
Do It Yourself
Top