Side Hustle Projects

side_hustle.md

Side Hustle

Some side hustle ideas

• A on-demand trash/recycle application
• A weather station using arduino/raspberry pi
• An in-home security monitoring system

Trash/Recycle App

• An 'MVP' for this app would be a real-time application (primarily for condos/apartments) that a user could request 'pick up' for theirtrash or recycing and get an 'estimated time of pickup' based on the amount of workers that are available to pick it up. On the employee side, the employee should be able to see how many reqests are coming in and the amount of time and the amount of materials that need to be picked up.

• Feature iterations:

  • Customer Locator - finding where the customer is
  • Completion Estimator - determining the time it will take to complete the job.
  • Payment process - How the customer will pay and at what price will they pay.

• I want to create this application becasue I hear a lot of people in my building complain about taking the trash out. Even though it's not a hard thing to do, some people do not like doing it. It may be something that is shared by a majority of people that live in condos/apartments.

• I'm not "totally" sold on this idea, but if I decide to take action, I will start with using a product management tool like waffle to initially start some user stories. I then would set some small "achievement" goals to keep myself focused.

• I would use my mentor to do some PR reviews, turing teachers (if they have enough time), and current coworkers that may have some experience with real-time applications.

• I would first start with people I know that live in condos or appartments. If they found value in it, I would try to explore other options to "get the word out" by using social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.

Weather Station

• The "MVP" for this project would be a product that measured temperature and streamed the data to an application in real-time.

• Feature Iteration:

  • Connect proper sensors (ie. temperature sensor) to arduino and program raspberry pi to collect data
  • Build a meteor application that can collect the sensor information from the raspberry pi and display it.
  • Provides basic calculations on temperature data to find trends in temperature.
  • Display data in a "cool" way.

• I want to build this project to learn more about the Internet of Things(IoT) and how web applications interact with them.

• I also plan to use a project management tool for this project as well. I feel that will be the most efficient way to stay orgainized and focused.

• I actually plan to pick Jason Pilz brain because he has had some experience in building a project like this one.

• I'm not sure that I want to deploy this project to the world. It seems like a real basic project.

In-Home Security System

• The "MVP" for this project would be using an arduino and raspberry pi, connected to a motion sensor and a basic camera that would start recording when the motion sensor is triggered.

• Feature Iterations:

  • Adding a web application where recordings could be streamed and collected for later viewing.
  • Adding door/window sensors
  • Adding a face recognition unit to doorway.

• I want to build this project just to see if it is possible. There are definitely more efficient products already on the market, but I would want to build one on my own for learning.

• I am not sure if there are any home security experts that I know, but I would probably ask Alan Smith about his experiences with node bots.

• Once again, I'm not sure that I would want to send this project out to the world. I would make the web application open source so anyone who wanted to work on it with me could do so.