Comment by cadr
3 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)
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... .
> 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...