Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.
Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I’m at the lower end for music production hardware.
Now I’m considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don’t quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.
I’m just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
…and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we’re distracted from spending money.
They’re generally said to deliver the sound-quality of medium-grade studio headphones for the price of low-grade ones. But that also means, aside from the sound quality, these are really basic headphones.
You should also mind that they’re open-back. So, they have no noise cancelling, neither active nor passive. You have to use these in a silent room.
If you’re wondering, because it doesn’t sound like I’ve actually spent much money yet, yeah, I’m generally quite frugal. I’m mostly just intimidated by all the options to spend money.
But well, my setup is:
Laptop running Linux (that already rules out buying most VST plugins, as those are often Windows-only).
Headphones: Sennheiser HD 560S (←only real money, I’ve spent so far)
For a DAW, I’ve been dabbling with LMMS. Felt more approachable to me than Ardour. I also enjoy dicking around with Surge-XT as one quite powerful VST/LV2 plugin.
I’m a traditionally trained musician, so I also enjoy creating electronic music via sheet music. And me being a programmer/weirdo, I like Lilypond for that (basically LaTeX for sheet music), despite it not being built for that…
Arduino and hobby electronics. It started out as a continuous loop pad dye machine to save me having to dye fabric by hand, strictly mechanical, but then I wanted to automate adding the chemicals at the right times. Then it was keeping the dye liquor a consistent temperature. Then it was draining the trough automatically. Then I figured out I could design my own PCBs and have them fabricated. It just keeps going…
I’d like to know more about this. I’m trying to get into electronics and hardware automation but feel overwhelmed since I don’t have any idea about electrical engineering
Honestly my recommendation would be to start off with some microcontrollers/Raspberry Pi and some breadboards and go from there. That way you can uhhh trial and error your way to something that works and worry about the “engineering” part later, when you have gotten your feet wet :D There are some simple Arduino starter kits for example that give you the basic things + a bunch of sensors and motors to play with. I got started myself with the Elegoo Arduino Starter Kit (~50€). Along the way it’s probably going to be helpful to look up some course on electronics basics, specifically digital circuits and then analog circuits if you’re feeling adventurous.
Best piece of advice I can give about learning anything (that doesn’t involve risk of injury): don’t try to learn everything there is to learn. Decide what you want to do and learn what you need to do that. Tell me something you’d be interested in doing…
I just had to replace the body/sole of my father’s old Stanley Bailey smoothing plane, because the cast iron got brittle in England’s winter chill and as I picked it up one morning it fell and smashed in two 😭
Was surprisingly easy to find replacement original Stanley Bailey parts cheap though, so I got it fixed up good as new :-D
I carve wood, so I was buying wood blanks to carve. Then my father in law said “oh, you use basswood, I’ve just cut down a whole bunch”, so he chainsaws some and mills it down to size and drops it off, but now my garage is full of basswood logs so I need to buy a new saw to rip it into smaller pieces to work with. But while I’m at the store a chisel set would be great for learning woodworking, and maybe a hand planer too since I don’t have space for power tools. I got a cope saw as a poor man’s bandsaw, for shaping, but now that I’m doing bigger pieces I could really use those Dremel tools…
Lol… Those tools make a fool of you. But my advice is “buy once, cry once”. If you need a bandsaw a coping saw ain’t gonna do. Even a small 9" wen bandsaw will do more and will just sit on the end of your bench.
A few seed packets and some dirt turns into building nice cedar raised gardens, filling them all with great quality soil, expensive liquid fertilizers, various irrigation systems, and so on. And I can’t just haul all that dirt in my sedan… But hey, I have 20+ tomato plants, and about as many different pepper plants every year.
It’s honestly nowheer near as expensive as some of my other hobbies, but on the “a lot more money than I expected” scale it’s up there.
House plants. Sure a few mass-market plants are dirt cheap, but soon you get into unusual plants, plants with special needs, hundreds/thousands of plants, grow lights, grow racks, terrariums, automated watering systems…
Farming - family has been doing it for ~5 generations. I’d say we have put in about $10 M dollars over time (adjusted for inflation).
What’s that dear? It’s a way of life/occupation . . . are you sure? Seems like it must be a hobby given the return we’ve made on it over the years. Well, if you’re sure.
My wife said that farming is technically an occupation and not a hobby. I still have my doubts given how much we have thrown away on it over the years, but I don’t like to disagree with her (she’s usually right).
This is something that’s really hard for me. I’m against corn subsidies because I’m tired of everything having corn/corn syrup because it’s so cheap. I think the subsidies should be based on something else that promotes variety, and also favors sustainable farming instead of monocropping with petroleum based fertilizer. I know it needs subsidized, because people are price sensitive, but it needs to be done differently.
Yeah this is one of those things I’ve just accepted will require someone really skilled in drafting political policy to fix, but with the ongoing trend of people leaving the farming trade such a farm subsidy reform is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve
I make a cross between dioramas and video games. It started out as a test to see if I could make something and now I am all in. It’s all I want to work on. I have spent so much money on old lcd screens
Wow I love this! When I was in school, you were seen as a cool kid if you had a four-colour BIC pen, but a amazing mechanical pencil like that Japanese one would have been much better!
Kuru Togas for sure for their rotating lead engine. The Advanced Upgrade specifically is my daily driver. The Pentel GraphGear 1000 is also a very comfortably hefty pencil. Otherwise the Pentel Orenz Nero and it’s auto dispensing lead mechanism is also really cool. Rotring 600 and Staedtler 925-35 are also popular pencils that I’ve tried and like, but I don’t own.
My oldest tree is a 15-year-old Japanese black pine purchased from an authentic bonsai nursery in nipomo California. The owner is a second generation bonsai artist and very kind person. Most of the fun for me is in turning young nursery stock into starter bonsai material. It’s easier than you might think, and I’m not doing this competitively so I don’t really mind if it’s not absolutely perfect.
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.
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
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?
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.
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