Ask HN: What are your favorite DIY kits?

My favourite 'DIY kit' is a well-filled dumpster with a variety of electrical, electronical and mechanical gizmo's, some of them broken beyond repair but good for parts, others seemingly unscathed but undocumented, some of them mysterious. Start young, lug home that 40kg beast of a broken television and get it to work again, next time take home that enormous speaker box, fix it and put it under the television - we're talking the early 80's here - and you're the first one on the block with a 'home entertainment' set. Play your Rockpalast Nacht [1] tapes on the thing while busily working on another mechanical marvel you came upon while cycling from school. I spent hours taking parts out of equipment beyond repair, collecting it in those cabinets with small drawers. I'm still using those parts now, more than 40 years later.

I'm a bit older now but for the rest not much has changed. Nearly all equipment around me is of such origin whether that be the stand-up desk I'm standing at (electrical fault, easily fixed) or the 27" iMac ('broken' videocard, 5 minutes in the oven later is worked) or the monitor next to it (2 broken capacitors in the power supply).

So, to answer the question, unless you happen upon a multimeter, oscilloscope, soldering iron and BGA rework station and fine-mechanical tool set while cycling past those are the things to buy to start yourself off as a scrounger, as someone who surfs the detritus of the consumption society. Just like - according to the crooks in the Donald Duck comics - 'stolen food tastes twice as good' you'll get far more satisfaction from using resuscitated hardware than from yet another unbox-try-put_in_drawer session.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockpalast_Nacht

I would love a DIY kit to build my own "smart" speaker (in the sense that it runs some kind of RPi on which I can put my own OS).

Or maybe just find a way to reverse-engineer my Marshall Stanmore, because their software sucks.

vunderba · a year ago

You can get pretty far with the ESP32 Box though the built-in speaker is a bit tinny.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/5835

I've got it working with local inference though some people use it with OpenAI.

hbossy · a year ago

LyRa-T devkit from espressif is perfect for that. It has a two-core ESP32, i2s decoders, jack connectors and direct speaker output. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/devkits/esp32-lyrat

0xEF · a year ago

Not a 100% sure if this is what you are looking for, but Pimoroni has the Pirate Radio kit. I have one, ended up dropping the guys into a vintage radio housing for extra cool look, but it's pretty easy and customizable since it's powered by an RPi Zero W.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pirate-radio-pi-zero-w-pr...

lurn_mor · a year ago

Here's my recent blog post on this very subject: http://www.undr.com/understatement/2024/replacing_sonos_due_...

palata · a year ago

Sweet! Though I know nothing about sound hardware. Do you just buy "dumb" speakers and connect them all to the RPi "somehow" (with this soundcard hat, I assume)?

I wonder how hard it would be for me to just open the Marshall, remove the "electronics", put an RPi there and connect the speaker/buttons...

Also I spent a few minutes reading the volumio website and I still don't really get what they bring. How is volumioOS better than just having a Debian on my RPi and playing sound files?

veggieroll · a year ago

I bought a Framework 13 DIY Edition [1] a few years ago have been using that as my main personal laptop since then. Recently, I had to make some repairs due to an accident and it's awesome that all the parts are available still and it was dead simple to repair.

I also loved building my Prusa printer. That took much longer to build (like probably 5 hours for me). But it was really cool to learn all the parts and feel really comfortable with how it works.

[1] https://frame.work

[2] https://www.prusa3d.com/category/3d-printers/

hagbard_c · a year ago

LarryMade2 · a year ago

For me it was the MiniPET from Tynemouth / TFW8b.com all through hole components and when done you power it up and you have a Commodore PET computer without the bulky case. Made my pandemic shelter-in-place time awesome.

Looks like the current models are pre-built, but if you can get a kit it's easy enough even for a (dangerous with a soldering iron) programmer like me to solder it successfully.

To see what its about - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHAIuE5BQWk (this is showing the older version - newer ones have a handy inbuilt SD card "drive" and 80 column PET capability.

sloaken · a year ago

I like to grow plants. But I am not a fan of leaning over. Raised garden beds seemed the answer, but I think this is better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGY-SCH-TPo&t=191s

There are a bunch of different styles people have come up with, including one with wheels.

I currently do buckets for my tomatoes, next year ..

nothercastle · a year ago

Build an earthtainer those things are awesome. Way better than any other garden diy thing I’ve ever built.

mcphage · a year ago

Back when I lived in an apartment building, someone in the building next door kept stealing shopping carts, and leaving them behind the building. So one year I grabbed one, lined it with hay, filled it with dirt, and grew tomatoes out of the sides. It worked really well!

ranc1d · a year ago

I'd like to have a go at some of the diy audio amp kits like this for example:

https://diyaudiostore.com/pages/project-starving-student-ii

noone_youknow · a year ago

You could build your own Motorola 68k computer:

https://rosco-m68k.com

(Caveat: I’m the founder of the open source project and I own the company, so obviously biased - other options in this space are available :) ).

8minsfromsol · a year ago

https://eater.net/6502

An 8 bit computer from scratch using ~discrete components. (Or at least simple ICs)

Comes with excellent companion videos from a superb educator: Ben Eater.

I also really like the 3 5s kit that makes one of the most famous integrated circuits, a 555 timer, from truly discrete components:

https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/6...