#3: 5 DIY Tech Project Ideas I Want to Try (and Why I Miss Building Things as a Software Engineer)

If I were the king of all software engineers, I would require all of us to designate one day per week when we don’t consume any tech-related news. I would be a benevolent king, don’t worry. I just think it would be for our own good.

I guess I can’t speak for everyone, but constantly reading about the newest LLM benchmarks, vibe-coding features and plugins, automation workflows, SaaS doomer posts, enterprise security breaches, and AI-generated social media content is exhausting to me.

If you never get tired of these things, then more power to you. Honestly, I sometimes wish I had the energy to keep up with all of it. My career would probably be light-years ahead of where it is now. But nonetheless, I’m human and a social being by nature, so lately I’ve been more conscious about doing things that stimulate my mind, nourish my soul, and, you know, involve touching grass.

If I were to represent my creativity over time as a graph, I imagine it would be a steady downward slope, reaching its lowest point around 2023 before gradually climbing back up to where it is today.

As a kid, I loved drawing, modifying my Hot Wheels boosters and racetracks to make the cars go faster, and taking apart multiple LEGO sets to build unique creations from all the different pieces.

As I made my way through school, university, and eventually the workforce, what I thought would be a renaissance of self-discovery, personal creativity, passion projects, and figuring everything out felt more like being placed on a conveyor belt with no way off.

I’ll probably expand on that in a future post, but it isn’t the focus of today.

Vibe coding actually helped rejuvenate some of my creativity during a slump in my career. I enjoy vibe coding random games and personal tools for myself, and I even bought into the dream of launching a micro-SaaS that goes viral.

The dream isn’t dead yet, but when you start considering all the regulations, market research, marketing execution, and stories about agent swarms and cybersecurity threats, it’s clearly not as simple as typing, “Make me an app that goes viral overnight. Make no mistakes.”

But really, I just miss making things with my hands.

Not to flex, but I’ve deployed code changes to enterprise-level applications that reach millions of users. And yet, the happiness and satisfaction I get from that work seem to have little correlation with the actual number of people it impacts.

Maybe part of me subconsciously recognizes that simply merging code used by millions of people doesn’t necessarily constitute something I would consider meaningful or inherently positive for society.

I think that by coming up with an idea and building something with my own hands, from scratch, I can finally call something truly my own rather than feeling like the final screw in a much larger machine, even if it doesn’t change the world.

Anyway, abrupt transition.

Here are five projects I’ve been thinking about trying over the next few months, in case anyone else wants to give them a shot too.

They’re hands-on, although many still incorporate some form of coding or software. I think combining the physical and digital worlds can lead to some truly amazing creations, the kind that make us feel hopeful about a more exciting and tangible future.

That, and it’s just really cool to hold something you’ve built yourself.

Also, I want to feel like a poor man’s version of Tony Stark.

1. IRL Life Dashboard

While you can definitely do this online, I think it would be really cool to have some sort of LED display or smart mirror mounted on your living room wall, powered by a Raspberry Pi and programmed to display whatever information you find useful.

Whenever I’m on my laptop, it already feels like I’m checking a million emails, opening 50 tabs, and trying to juggle multiple tasks at any given time.

If I had a personal dashboard in my home, I’d probably have it display NBA scores, the weather, maybe some stock prices, and hourly words of affirmation or inspirational quotes.

2. Raspberry Pi Voice-Controlled Smart Robot Car

Fortunately, chassis boards, wheels, motors, wiring, and basic soldering equipment are relatively cheap to order online these days.

You could also attach a camera to the Raspberry Pi robot car to capture visual input and stream what it sees directly to your phone.

And now that AI has become so powerful, you could give an agent access to navigation tools and have it plan and execute different routes.

Instead of controlling the car with a remote, you could simply give it instructions like, “Go to the kitchen and show me whether I left the stove on.”

Eventually, with more advanced robotics, you could even incorporate the ability to perform small physical tasks, like fetching you a drink or locking a door.

3. Magnetic Levitation Desk Piece with 3D-Printed Customization

Have you ever seen those lamps with a base and an actual light fixture hovering above it, seemingly like magic?

Well, they actually sell DIY kits for these that include the base electronics and the load-bearing magnet.

With a 3D printer, or even a quick trip to the arts and crafts store, you can let your creativity run wild and build pretty much anything you can imagine.

A cloud floating over a river, a flying carpet, your favorite planet. The possibilities are practically endless.

It’s not too technically difficult, but it could give you some introductory experience with 3D modeling and printing!

4. Four-Corner Keystone Correction for a Projector

Imagine this: You buy an old-school projector, but you have no convenient way to mount it or position it directly in front of the wall you want to project onto. So, you resort to placing it on the ground and angling it upward, roughly toward where you want the image to appear.

The problem is that, without something called keystone correction, the projected image becomes a warped quadrilateral unless you can properly align the projector both horizontally and vertically.

Newer projectors often have keystone correction built in, but with a coding agent, you might not need to pay a premium for those features.

If you’re projecting from a computer, you could create a program that allows you to manually adjust the coordinates of the four corners of the image. You could then have the agent (or do it yourself if you’re feeling particularly smart that day) work out the perspective-transform calculations needed to compensate for the projector’s awkward placement.

And boom, a much more rectangular display without needing built-in four-corner keystone correction. There are still physical limitations, of course, especially when it comes to extreme projection angles, focus, and image quality.

Another fun mini-project you could try with this technology involves a blank painting canvas.

Instead of painting something traditionally, you could create artwork using your favorite animation software and project it onto the canvas. By adjusting the four corners of the projection to match the canvas’s dimensions, you could essentially turn a physical painting into an animated piece of art!

5. Book-Reading Robot

Now, I want to preface this by saying that I think it’s very important to read books yourself. And if you have children, read to them!

Don’t rely on AI to replace the experience of reading the written word or deprive yourself of the time you could spend reading with your children.

I’m pitching this idea more as a decorative and atmospheric piece than as a replacement for reading.

What I’m imagining is some kind of book holder with a robotic page-turning mechanism, combined with a camera and computer vision tools that allow it to read the book aloud to the room.

Ultimately, the underlying technology is nothing more than a text-recognition and text-to-speech workflow.

But when you bring it into the physical world, encase it in a beautiful handcrafted holder, and maybe even put it on some sort of turntable, you’ve suddenly got a unique piece of home decor made straight from the heart and mind. :)