Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”
Has there already grown a noteworthy Arduino/ESP Community on Lemmy?
I would love to read about this $20 weather station! Do you maybe have a link?
Mine is pretty basic but is built on the shoulders of giants. Also that $20 was from pre-pandemic / pre-chip shortage prices. I’m guessing it’s more like $35 now, or maybe high $20s from ali express.
I use Home Assistant for home automation. It has a now official addon called ESPHome for easily configuring esp devices and adding them to Home Assistant.
I bought some cheap dev boards off amazon and thankfully they worked an esp8266 microcontroller with IC2 headers and a microusb port already onboard a bmp280 that measures temp, humidity, and barometric pressure a lux sensor with a plastic dome over the top I soldered them together on a prototyping boardAll the components were supported by esphome, so I just needed to write the device config and then flash the devboard via esphome (in a web browser) over the built in usb.
I 3d printed a housing for it, but you can also buy boxes. It needs airflow but also needs to stay dry. You can use a spray sealant to help avoid corrosion from ambient humidity. I skipped that step because I want to see how quickly it becomes problematic… and I should probably check on that.
Just an fyi bmp280 is not real temperature but an estimation based on air pressure.
Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.
And then it turns out some horrendously ugly piece of plastic (like the Kinesis Advantage 360) is better for actually using.
I never got the appeal of mechanical keyboards. If you actually have to type all day, a proper flat keyboard like in the old MacBooks ('09-ish) is way nicer and costs much less.
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
I currently bought an old desktop from a friend that I use as my Homeserver.
- I bought 3 HDDs for storage
- I rent a VPS
- I rented Proton to host mail for my domain, but switched to netcup groupware because that sucked.
- Some domains
- Electricity
Wow I thought it was way more.
One time costs: ~500€ Monthly costs: ~15€ Plus electricity, but I have solar. I assume it’s about 150€/year
But I’m a cheap selfhosted, but eventually, I will have a huge ass Enterprise Level Rack in my basement.
I bought myself a raspberry pi for my birthday a few years ago.
I now have thousands of dollars in hardware sitting in a server rack in my office. Whoops.
This is not the first post where I feel it but I love it so much that we have a lot of people on Lemmy that can talk about things not related to computers!
Except the selfhost crowd here.
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying “proper coffee”
To
Buying a cafetiere (~£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~£170)
To
Buying an entry Level “proper” espresso machine (~£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I’d actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I’m a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
I can’t believe I answered “board games” to this before. Yes, espresso wins it over. I just got an espresso machine for my 10th anniversary (price too high for me to be willing to admit). And here I have a wishlist of $500+ in “devices” for it.
Like you, I’m about 3 weeks in and just now getting my burr grind just right for that perfect 26s shot. Luckily my vendor was giving out a free badass scale. It keeps telling me how bad my shot is.
I still for the life of me can’t get the hang of latte art though.
Ditto. I just got my first “correct emulsified foam” today. Usually I end up with hot milk with hot whipped milk on top.
Similar but different : tea! You go from cheap bagged tea to going down the rabbit hole of loose leaf variations, temp control kettles, brewing vessels and brewing styles.
Even low-grade Dragonwell is eyeopeningly expensive. And nothing tastes quite like it.
It tastes a ground up $20 bill soaked in hot water ;)
Playing music. Started on a shitty hand-me-down acoustic guitar. Got a better guitar. Got an electric. Got a better amp. Got a couple of pedals. Got a better amp. Got like 6 more amps, some cabs, 5 more guitars, a huge pedalboard, a cello, a keyboard, an audio interface, attenuators, mics, etc etc.
You gotta understand… I need all this stuff. There are subtle differences that you’ve never noticed before but will probably hear once I do an a/b comparison for you, and I absolutely must get an AC15 next to round out the collection instead of buckling down and recording something.
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Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)
…anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.
I unintentionally grow weed because I made some tincture for grandma.
Now it just grows on my garden and I can’t get rid of it.
One of it’s many nicknames is ditchweed for a reason. It’s a weed like any other. The US spends millions per year burning it out of ditches on the side of the road all around the country.
I’d be happy to burn it for them!
A little bit at a time!
Coffee. I’m in a coffee producing country. It could be as cheap as grabbing a bag from the coffee institute (really good and cheap), a cloth filter and call it a day. Instead, I’m on my second espresso machine, fourth grinder, second portafilter set, and have all the doodads to make it just how I like it.
Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)… more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
Mechanical keyboards. Picked up a keychron for cheap. Decided it was too loud, decided to change the switches. Then the keycaps. Now I’m ordering barebones keyboards and artisan custom keycaps. This shit is an addiction.
I am probably too late to this… But here goes.
Every damn time I get into something, I over do it.
I spent $13k on my kitchen stove, this one keeps giving, but that is $13,000.00 USD! Just for my kitchen stove. My range hood because it is required with my high output stove was $3k, and then let’s talk makeup air to replace what is taken out by it.
Or what about woodworking? Yep, I wanted to do it, and still do. I have a half completed work bench, and some basic tools… That will be about $2k…
Let’s buy a boat! Yep 29 years old, runs great… Break out another thousand…
But most recently, Plex… You know, let’s get rid of subscriptions… Yeah, this year alone I have put $900 or so into that. Yep I sure saved money on canceling Netflix!
Selfhosting media
Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I’m in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I’ll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and “private cloud!” Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and “cloud” services is a massive genuine benefit!
I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially “donating” it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I’m consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.
It’s a toss up between cooking and home networking for me.
Cooking because it started off as just finding neat recipes and giving them a shot to now experimenting with new techniques and harder to procure ingredients. My pantry looks like a mini spice market and keeping them fresh is its own hassle. Plus needing all the gear gets expensive!
I also got really into home networking during the start of the pandemic. I went from having a simple off the shelf mesh network to a full network rack in my basement serving some high end access points and cat6 drops in every room. Now I have a pretty secure iot stack that’s separate from my main vlan and one devoted to my work computer.
