Comment by cadr
7 hours ago
I don’t know how niche they are, but a few I’ve done in the past
- 3D printed musical instruments. Print other designs or contribute your own
- lock picking. When you really get into it, you modify locks to make them more of a challenge and mail them to people
- Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat. I’m currently mainly interested in linearizing switch-mode amplifiers, but was doing fox hunting for a bit (radio direction finding), and periodically do POTA (transmitting from parks)
> Ham radio is hundreds of sub-hobbies in a trench coat
Really good way of putting it! POTA can be a lot of fun.
HAM radio is whole range of things that were not possible when I was getting into it - first of all it's super cheap to start now, and you can probably bounce RF signals off the moon for less than $100 nowadays. Shortwave radio has always allowed signals to go around the world (by bouncing off the stratosphere). Most likely the new digital + AI capabilities means that a few well positioned relays could make for a very independent, low bandwidth Internet. Solar powered BTS or APs all kinds of experiments are possible...
Any pointers to resources or groups around 3D printed musical instruments? Sounds really interesting!
There is a /r/3dprintedinstruments subreddit that if you sort by best of all time has a lot of good stuff.
Fipple flutes like recorders and ocarinas tend to be easy to start with. I also had good luck with the Modular Fiddle [https://openfabpdx.com/download/modular-fiddle-complete-desi... .