Selfhosted

The latest thing I've cobbled together with n8n is a routine that goes out to https://sol24.net/ and pulls in the current Aurora forecast and the current 7 day video of solar flares into my dashboard. I've always had a fascination with how the sun affects the earth and the protective layers of our atmosphere, since I was a child. I built my own 5 watt, code only, transmitter and receiver and would set in my room late nights collecting QSL cards and talking to people from all over the world . I quickly learned that the ionosphere and other protective layers affected how far my little 5 watt signal would bounce. Solar flares burn holes in the ionosphere and prevent a good bounce halfway around the world. So the challenge was to pick days where there was good ionosphere coverage, and minimal solar flares in conjunction with antenna positioning.

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This is the current video which takes you from 11/29 to 12/5. It's mind boggling to me the absolute power and energy represented: https://sol24.net/data/stereo_7day_euvi304.mp4

You could probably conjure up something in bash to do this, but I really like working in n8n.

Here is what I use it for:

• Download top voted pictures from CivitAI
• Pull weather data and get notified if it is going to rain
• Subscribe to events posted by the police (polling their API)
• Scrub lunch restaurants for todays menu
• Get notified when a streamer I follow on twitch starts streaming
• The same for YouTube but I haven't finished this one yet.
• Webhook (combined when a one file web page) to note down every time my oldest kid has this strange coughing.
• Send me this week's number (because some people use it and knowing that today is week 50 can be useful a few times a year).

I use ntfy for my notifications. I was also planning to monitor if I sold anything in Guild Wars 2 but I haven't bothered setting up a table in a database to keep track of if I have seen the latest changes, otherwise I would get the same notification over and over.

I came here hoping to read some cool use cases, but so far it's people doing notifications for services that already provide notifications...

I'm not using n8n, but I am using Node-RED and would like to hear from people who have used both.

Only semi-related:

How do people pronounce this?

In Ate In?
Nate In?
Innate In?
Nathan?

Local hosted n8n: local AI llm agent (for privacy), that can use tools to search the web, check my emails and calendar, save memories, get Youtube transcript, etc.

Scheduled workflows to get me some stock info every morning.

Working on a research crawler with crawl4AI.

Only limitations seem to be my will to learn new stuff. I'm sure all this could be written in Python or something but I'm not a programmer.

I self host n8n in a docker container on my home lab mainly as something to just fuck about with.

Production workloads include leveraging my work calendar and completing my daily time sheets, cleaning up my mailbox at the end of the week, and providing access alerts for my Traefik proxy.

Are there any a|ternatives to n8n?

My most common use case is telegram integration via bot API - adding mobile controls to services that otherwise don't have acceptable (for me) UI. I've also tried their LLM integration and tool node to create a simple agent that reaponds directly to messages, but for now it can only save links to my linkwarden instance. I found it acceptable and plan to add more tools. Basically, i want it to automatically decide what to do with stuff that i send to chat.

I can't think of a use case, that couldn't be realized in Bash instead.

Well, everything can be done in bash (or in python, more probably), but n8n makes it easier to tweak. With "batteries included" many stuff can be done without prior research and without external dependencies. They even added built-in databases in recent release.

Send GraqhQL requests on incoming webhooks and filesystem changes