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.
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.
Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
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.
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!
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!
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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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!
Traditional painting and illustration! While I now know that I never needed to spend more than $250 for professional-grade tools, I’ve spent about $18,000. As for sales in 3.5 years, they don’t account for more than $800. For that I mostly blame Instagram where it’s not possible to grow anymore organically and get an audience & potential customers. So I moved to the federated open source PixelFed now, if anyone’s interested in my book-style illustration: https://pixelfed.social/EugeniaLoli
Also, as a word of advice for anyone who wants to also do illustration and don’t want to do the same mistakes that I did. All you need is:
- The Lukas 24 watercolor palette of student grade ($18). It’s good enough and these days most paintings are scanned, so even if not all colors are lightfast, it’s not a big deal. Few people only buy originals, most go for prints. If you’re going to go selling originals, consider the Daniel Smith primaries set of 6 colors for $40.
- A set of brushes of different sizes, including a flat brush and round brushes including a long thin one to do details, $15
- Pencil, eraser, sharpener, $15
- A set of gouache. Best bang for the buck for professional quality is DaVinci brand ($10 per large tube), or if you want to go cheap, the Himi Miya set for $25. If you go for the cheaper stuff, it’s still advised to get a better quality white tube, so it’s truly opaque (the cheap stuff aren’t opaque enough). So go for Holbein or DaVinci white for $10-$15.
- Soft core colored pencils, set of 48+. $15 (you will mostly need the muted colors to enhance the painting with harder edges)
- Grey, sepia, black ink pens, and manga ink brush pens (for some types of paintings only), $40
- 100% cotton paper for watercolor $25, or any watercolor paper for gouache $10 (gouache works on any, watercolor is more nuanced).
- Brush watercolor markers, e.g. Tombows or Ecoline – in case you want to do such type of illustration too, $30 for a few muted colors.
- Masking fluid for watercolors, $10
- White gel pen and white Posca pen (0.7mm) for white highlights, $15
- Faber Castell white pencil soft pastel, $4
- Caran d’ache Luminance white colored pencil, $4 (the cheaper colored pencils above again don’t include a strong white)
- Caran d’ache Neocolor II white crayon, $4
- A ruler, to help you sketch.
I included various mediums above in white color because highlights are king in illustration, and each provides a different look and feel, depending on the painting. Happy painting!
For me, it’s board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I’m sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.
No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.
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.
I’m not sure it can get worse than bird watching. Completely free to start. Then you are like “man I wish I could see that bird over there” so you buy some binoculars. Then you think “dang this bird is moving too fast I still can’t identify it, maybe I should try photographing it”. Two months later you’ve spent 10k because bird photography is apparently the most intense kind of photography. Turns out photographing very tiny things that move very fast from very far away is very difficult and the lenses you need start at thousands of dollars and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. That isn’t including the camera body, which you probably want very fast autofocus on, along with bird eye tracking, which hardly comes on any cameras at all.
Yeah…
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Videogames. It has not been super expensive as I enjoy indie games the most, but still.
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Pen and paper organization. This is recent. Due to a couple of mental disorders, I have problems remembering things and keeping organized. I was using a to-do list for my phone, but it was becoming less and less effective with time.
So I found a weekly planner online and I bought it telling myself that it was expensive, but it would be enough for a year and I wouldn’t need anything else.
The planner has been great, by the way. Yet, when it arrived, I liked it so much that I had this classic feeling of not wanting to ruin it with my handwriting. I needed a good mechanical pencil! Erasable, yet stylized.
Then I thought the pages looked clean, but monotone. Stickers! What about my own creations? Thermal printer with sticker rolls! And so on and so on.
I am productive …and addicted to stationery items.
Buy a good mechanical pencil and coloured and black leads made by Pentel, Ain Stein model, or Uni’s equivalent. You need not sink money when you get the colour variety with leads.
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Hiking.
This.
You get some gear. It’s nice, but heavy…then you realize there’s so much lighter stuff out there.
$100/lbs later your congratulating yourself that your base weight is 15lbs until you add food and water, and you realize that your pack still is too heavy. You finally shave off another 2 lbs by buying all new luxury items at $30-$50 a pop, and getting a lighter stove.
Then winter comes, and that 4 season, dyneema tent looks mighty appealing. Not to mention you need a better rated sleeping bag (cause that hammock ain’t gonna cut it) and a pad, a better puffy and fleece, crampons, maybe an ice pick, and another stove that works in the cold…
Edit. Damn it, I forgot I need new shoes…even if I wanted to brave it using my summer pair, those trail running shoes are destroyed over the course of 1 season.
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Photography.
I started to really get into it back in 2015 with a Sony A6000 and a kit lens. Then you buy more, higher quality lenses. Then you buy better camera bodies with full frame sensor, then lenses that are full frame compatible. Then the various odds and end accessories. Then trips around the world to take pictures of things.
I have taken a break from photography recently, on account that having a kid doesn’t allow me a lot of opportunity to edit my photos anymore. They say the best camera you have is the one that is on you. That has proven to be true while I try to be as present as possible around my daughter. I can quickly take out my phone, capture the moment and it will take care of most of the post processing edits that I can share with family later.
That was the first camera I got as well, and same story here. It’s a hobby that gets expensive pretty quickly.
