The initial investment for espresso is pretty steep, but I think it’s well worth it. There’s something so satisfying about making your own coffee drinks yourself. And if you think about it, you’ll probably drink coffee for the rest of your life, so you’ll end up breaking even eventually.
Getting back into PC gaming after buying my friends old 300 euro gaming PC. I’m looking to upgrade and every little bit faster is only a little bit extra, so a 100 euro upgrade turned to a 120 euro upgrade, then a 150 euro upgrade to… i don’t want to say how much i spent…
My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I’ll probably ever need.
I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money
Oh boy, where do I even start. I guess we should first have a minute of silence for my wallet…
Fixing old computers
In high school, I agreed to take the decommisioned PCs home. They were in various states of not working, I diagnosed the problems, bought parts, upgraded and fixed them all. I now had a ton of relatively old but reliable computers. What’s the logical next step?
Home server room (homelab).
I live in a flat with a giant basement, so it’s full of these old PCs and servers. I needed a server rack, switches, cabling, the whole nine yards.
Photography
New lenses and filters constantly bought. Sometimes a new camera body. This is my most expensive hobby by far, but I take care of the lenses so they at least hold value, unlike the PCs :)
+1 for photography it’s addicting to buy new gear lol
I started with a relatively cheap Lumix g95 ($700) m43 camera thinking it would have everything I need. But for video I wanted slow mo. It had slow mo but the bit rate was horrendous. At the time I had no idea and none of the information online told you this at all. It was just a check mark ✓ High Frame rate and I had no idea how important bit rate was. Bought better lenses (approx 1200$) because I wanted depth of field and lower light performance. Which m43 just couldn’t provide, but I really wouldn’t have known how much it couldn’t provide it. I trudged on.
Upgraded to GH5 (800$ on offer up), same lenses but much better sensor, higher frame rates, 4k support, better video codex’s. Still had issues with low light and depth of field. Oh yeah and to top it off all Lumix cameras have terrible auto focus. Which is only amplified by my yearning to have lower depth of field, cause more of the picture is out of focus. Now I want to pull the cord and buy a full frame sony camera (2500$ + another $2500 in lenses). I still think GH5 is a great camera and got good use out of it
I have a collection of various Zeiss lenses, because my proffesional photographer friend told me he enjoys them. They’re amazing, but I refuse to even share how much I paid for them, since I’d probably cry :D I also have a few from various brands like Canon, Sigma, etc.
In terms of cameras, I always bought a new one, used it for a while, sold it and bought a new one. I settled on the Canon 1DX Mark III in the end, I think I’ll use this one until it dies.
That basement full of old pcs and servers… Checked some models against ebay?
I bought a pallet of “computers” from a local agricultural auction for £1 based on nothing but that one word description. Turns out one was a fully working PS/2 with monitor and keyboard. The keyboard alone sold for £80, and I made over £200 on the lot and got some great messages from the buyers who were really pleased to find one.
I never did, really. I don’t have anything special in there, just some Dell Optiplexes and HP stuff… I wanted to sell them but once I found out I’d maybe get 20€ a piece, I decided to keep them and try out new software on them, use them for parts, etc.
I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you’ve got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you’ve got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least – or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.
I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you’re the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.
This stuff absolutely doesn’t need to be expensive. I was doing electronics for a long time now. I guess I am at professional level but I never got regular 9-5 job doing electronics, I was always doing odd jobs like repair, design, construction.
I only recently got modern tools for this. For years my books, parts, tools and methods were mostly from 70s/80s that I got from various public dumps. That was 10 years ago though, now these places are closed.
If you need to do something really fast and cheap - draw a pcb with sharpie and use ferric chloride to etch it. Modern oscilloscope is a luxury. Since I was working mainly with audio stuff I had a diy amplifier with a speaker connected to it that I used to listen to waveforms.
A lot of tools can made by hand too. There is a ton of old projects for old atmega microcontrollers. One of the best projects like this was sold as generic chinese made “multipurpose tester” which - last time I checked - was not properly designed when looking at the original. Original would this one - www.mikrocontroller.net/…/AVR_TransistortesterBut everything necessary for this project is here - github.com/svn2github/transistortester/…/master
Ah, some context – I live in Vietnam. We don’t get tools or books from the 70’s and 80s from the trash. New Chinese stuff is pretty good and not a fortune, although at the start I really couldn’t afford even that. I was making like 240 US dollars a month in those days, and working 60 hours a week, so I had no free time to do labor-intensive things (or pursue hobbies at all, really). That’s why I wanted tools so much I suppose : to do fewer labor intensive things so I could use my mind more.
AVRs are my favorite chips! I use the Attiny10 all the time (USD 0.36 per chip). AVRs have really nice assembly language and datasheets, they are a joy to work with! Attiny10 is maybe a bit difficult to do with the sharpie method. I bet you could with some practice and a very fine pen though.
I etch PCBs by hand at home sometimes these days, because I almost exclusively use SMT. I can usually do a board start to finish in 45 minutes, for iterating rapidly a few times before being satisfied with it. Toner transfer works really well on a gas stove + a big metal plate! However, I can also get boards made at a factory for 15-20$ with a 3 week lead time. That’s usually much cheaper than a few 45 minute runs, so recently I’ve just been sending it off to the factory without etching + testing first.
The main cost is time, overall. I’m not wealthy, time is still super expensive to me right now, I’m in the finishing steps of bootstrapping myself out of poverty. An engineering company was a tool to monetize my interests, so that I could pursue a middle class life, without giving up the control I insist on having over my time and work. Really, it was the only way I could have pursued all this tech stuff at all.
Actual physical tools to do more work faster and more reliably was also really important. Having a company also gives me a 30% discount on tools – no 10% VAT, and no 20% corporate income tax on the amount of profits it ate up (only if I’m legitimately using it for client work though).
Have you tried 3D printing enclosures? There’s a bit of up front cost if you don’t have a printer already, but after that the material costs are pretty cheap. It’s really cool to be able to make a custom enclosure with all the cutouts, integrated standoffs, panel markings, etc all in a single print.
Yeah, I’ve tried that! It was more of a journey making my work more presentable, than it was making it more functional, if we’re being honest.
I invested some proceeds from an early client work to buy an SLA printer. It uses acrylic, with good dimensional accuracy, but it’s very brittle. It was a painful expense at the time, nearly 800$.
I considered it a marketing cost – I can’t present things to clients with wires hanging out. Prototypes have to look awesome. I also sometimes use it to print basic clockwork, board game pieces, whatever I might personally consider fun. Mostly client cases though. I’ve had very good success with black plastic, which I polish down to a very smooth matte finish using fine emery paper soaked in water. I also emboss the client’s logo on the case. I rarely paint it, but do sometimes add labels.
Another good investment was a decent used DSLR (135$) and some antique lenses (because they were very cheap and better than midrange modern ones). When I deliver physical prototypes, I also deliver product shots good enough to use professionally e.g. for marketing or to show the CEO / investors. A high-end ancient macro lens cost me 10$ and has paid itself off many times.
Finally, I also bought a rugged waterproof plastic suitcase filled with foam. Similar to a “pelican case”. These are used to deliver prototypes to meetings and demonstrations.
I would classify this as ‘theater’ more than ‘technology’ – but generally the management understands the former better, and they are the ones making purchasing decisions. So I give them a show, and the detailed documentation goes to the engineers only.
For my own stuff, I design it to fit in standard engineering enclosures. One of the local retailers has a quite good selection of aluminium and ABS ones. This is much more robust than any form of 3D printing I have access to (and it’s cheap – a nice ABS box starts at like USD 0.50). FDM printing would be OK, but I don’t have the budget or space (actually space is the expensive thing in Asia) for a second printer.
The other thing I like doing for my own stuff is using solid and thick brass sheets, for no reason at all. Family ancestral shrines use a lot of brass here, so it’s less expensive here. It’s heavy, and chromed industrial buttons on brass panels looks glorious. Makes for great robots too. At least when I have an extra 15$ to spend (I’m quite stingy – being poor in the past will do that to you).
Woodworking. You start with a few tools to fix things in your house, and suddenly, you got vintage handtools worth thousands of euros and you seriously speak of installing your “shop”.
Woodworking is extremely expensive and you don’t recognise it early on. Even if you don’t have vintage tools,etc. the sunken cost fallacy will fuck you over. And we are not even talking about expensive things like CNCs, tablesaws,etc.
And wood itself is expensive. My rather mediocre wood storage was ruined by flooding recently and the damage is way beyond 2k. Just fucking wood. Not even expensive wood. Normal wood.
Is it that expensive though? My dad has a table saw for 800 bucks, wuth the table allowing to put a mill tgat he got for maybe 400 bucks. The rest around is some general tools, a quality drill and drill stand, an air filter and a self made cyclone box for the vacuum. Top it off with some self made helpers like a a sledge for the table saw. The whole ordeal is not more than 4-5k and tgere is almost nothing he cannot do by himself now.
CNC systems are hardly needed for non professionals.
There are always different levels how deep you go in,but usually you also have a router or router table (between 0,5-1k including bits), a sander (0,5k with sanding paper), the workbench (around 1-4k), etc.
5k for just the basics is very reasonable and that misses the main thing: The bloody wood. Wood has become extremely expensive over the years, especially since the war started and if you do something that keeps you occupied 8h a week it will easily 1-2k of wood and other small stuff per year.
That is then around 10k for 5y of the hobby + optimistically speaking.
I wouldn’t consider the wood as costs so easily. For instance we made furniture ourselves, like a bed, shelves, closets, stuff in the garden… If we would have bought the things instead, it would have been more expensive than the wood and other materials that went into it.
Of course the labor in this case is hobby, as it isnt competitive, but then again we got useful high quality stuff out of it, that will last a lifetime.
Depends on the furniture you buy,surely, but at least I have not been able to produce any furniture cheaper (just material costs) vs. factory build simply because they can cut more corners/get cheaper materials/can use techniques that would need more sophisticated equipment than I can.
Unless you compare it to massively and individually build carpenter furniture I always am more expensive (okay it’s usually more solid and individual, though)
Yes you’re right. The bed for instance was 300 € material costs using 27mm glued wood beech, wher you can buy stuff using plywood for cheaper. But it looks much better and will last much longer.
So in terms of quality it is somewhere in between factory and carpenter buildt. For furniture it is well worth it imo. and i couldn’t find quality stuff for less than the associated material costs. Yet you can find a lot of plywood furniture that is way to overprized because “designer” or whatever.
Started out with a raspberry pi several years ago. Got my feet wet with entry level, beginner friendly NAS prebuilds. Hunted for recycled computer parts. Now searching for and actively acquiring enterprise gear that is making a massive dent in my wallet.
Serverpartdeals.com for refurbished HDDs. Fractal define R5 case for the 6 14 TB HDDs and 2 SSDs for cache, a uUSB thumb drive to run unraid. Some ram, a PSU, a Mobo, and a very old quadro GPU, only a couple grand in parts and your obsession is fed, for now.
I like to repair and restore broken vintage audio gear.
“Wow, this 60’s Sansui amp and those 70’s AR speakers are practically free! I already have all the tools I need to repair them, it’ll be fun and cheap. When I get these restored, I won’t need anything else ever again!”
Would I be correct that this hobby, if it’s not just having a nice thing for everyday use, does it eventually lead into: calligraphy, fancy stationary, special vellum papers, custom wax stamp seal kits, grinding your own ink, etc?
When I first got into my hobby (DJ) I thought I only needed to pay into the set up cost of buying equipment (turntables, mixer, sound), but I eventually learned that I had to keep buying records because I couldn’t just mix the same two recorded forever, and that got expensive.
If you get good at it and if you run enough hives each year, it does, eventually, start making money though! Which is almost more frustrating, because every dollar you spend on it could come back some day in honey sales… but will it?
That’s only my 30’s which is the last 4 years. Hobbies for me are normally short and fierce obsessions when I start, they eventually slow down into a more ‘normal’ pasttime that I do sometimes to past the time.
LoL I feel that so hard but I’m way to cheap and frugal so everything I do is done used and on a budget to keep me from going overboard so I generally only end up spending a couple hundred max before it turns into a part-time that I pull out on occasion while looking for something to distract me from impending doomerism
RC stuff, but only kinda? My dad got me into micro helicopters about a decade ago. I now have several dozen planes, drones, helis, etc. Not to mention multiple RC radios, batteries, chargers, and FPV goggles. Absolutely love it, though. To be fair, it’s been a few thousand dollars over a decade. It ads up sure… but quite a bit less than I spend on video games, and more satisfying. :)
Out of curiosity, have the battery lives improved from older RC vehicles? I’ve looked at some current models and it still seems like they run only a short time, but I’ve not followed RC stuff closely enough to know if they’ve really gotten much better and I’m lacking the context.
I race electric on-road and we have a couple endurance races we run every year. We’re able to get upwards of 45+ minutes of run time without losing performance from some of our high capacity (8000mah+) batteries.
But we also run high turn (21.5t or 25.5t), and sometimes fixed timing, motors, so draw isn’t that significant.
My Losi Baja Rey running a 3600kv (beefy, high draw) motor gets 15-20 minutes of run time from my 5000mah battery depending on how hard I run it.
Run time really comes down to how high draw the motor is, lipo battery technology is significantly improved over the old nicad and nimh chemistries of the past.
Thanks for the reply and insight! I suspect some of the models I was looking at may have had some lower capacity batteries to try to balance out the costs, and I was overlooking that.
Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven’t improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.
I’ve been racing RC cars for about 7 years. The last time I tallied it up, I estimated that I’ve spent about $15k all-in on the hobby.
Between cars, tools, bodies, paints, tires, racing fees, program setup like hauler bags, batteries, oils, springs, hop ups, and a dozen other things the costs can get out of hand quick lol. I’ve had to pull back my budget a LOT since getting a divorce and it’s getting cheap, but that’s only possible because of how much I’ve already spent on my program, and my cars are getting old. I’ll need to find a few hundred dollars in the next year at least.
Ah racing yeah. I had a friend that was into that, and it seems to get pretty spendy. I do a lot of scratch built planes, so it’s quite a bit cheaper I think. Even a “spendy” store bought plane tends to only be $200 - $300. Racing drones cost about as much, but I don’t really race them, and rarely break them anymore.
Yea, I spent $400 on my radio, and that’s a mid grade Sanwa. But I won’t replace it for a long time.
On a budget you need to spend around $500 to have everything you need to put a car down and race, which includes some basic tools. So yea, it gets expensive fast.
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