What are some good beginner-level tinkering projects to do at home?

You can look around for solder joints to fix. Whirlpool used to make a front load washing machine that shook its solder joints off. There are also electronic assembly kits you can buy. Whatever you do, don’t mess with any old-style tube TVs. Those contain flyback capacitors with about 30,000 volts stored in them. That would be very bad for your heartbeat.

You need to talk to @LuckyGuy , and @ARE_you_kidding_me .

@RocketGuy is totally correct, look out for the high-voltage section of any CRT display.

I am Not suggesting any dangerous activity but if you must slake your curiosity be prepared.
Lookup online how to discharge a corona wire properly. (pro tip: Not with your prying fingers) It’s not hard and once you get that over with you can tinker about. If you fire it up with the case open to do diagnostic troubleshooting, be Very Aware At All Times.
Try to find the service manual for your model online, and/or a schematic. With or without documentation, the power supply is a good place to start. I was a bench tech for a few years on a product that included a CRT monitor, monitors have some sophisticated analog tech to make the beam and put it in the right place, monitors are fun.

CAREFUL WITH THE CRT!!

CRT Safety Procedures

“The vacuum tube in a CRT can implode if it is broken or punctured. The surrounding air will rush violently into the unsealed vacuum in the CRT, spraying broken glass in every direction.”

“Color CRTs may contain mercury or other potentially toxic materials. If the CRT is broken or cracked, these materials may be released and pose a risk of toxic exposure.

“A charged CRT carries high voltage—about 27,000 volts in a color unit. You could electrocute yourself unless you handle the display using the appropriate safety procedures.”

I think you might like the Hackaday blog. You’ll find some really interesting projects, from simple to far advanced.

Oooo. There are so many inexpensive electronics kits in the $15 range. LEDs, alarm systems, music, etc. So many!
What do you like?
You can also go to a local HamFest and walk around to get ideas.. Search for amateur radio and the name of your town. You’ll find one and it will open a whole new world to you.

If you are willing to expand your horizons with some elementary programming, you can start with an Arduino. There is a ton of documentation for it on the Web and in bookstores and libraries. Once you have mastered the Arduino, you can move up to the Raspberry Pi.

I’m looking into Arduino projects to make sensors that update a web page to see if the washer & dryer are running. We have a 3-flat & I know the 3rd floor tenants would like to save the trip to the basement if the machines are busy.

It will be a month or two before I have time to start in earnest.

@Call_Me_Jay Have you looked at piezoelectric buzzer discs? They make excellent vibration sensors and only cost about $0.20! Splurge and get them with leads. If you attah them to the wall of the washer or dryer they will put out an AC voltage if the unit is running or making noise.

Yep, arduino is about the quickest and easiest way to get into real tinkering. If you really want to take it to the next level learn the basics of programming in C and take a few basic electronics courses at your local community college. Then all those code and circuit examples will start making sense. Once that happens you are off on your own. Tinkering with radios is fun and xbees from digi integrate well with sensors and arduinos. You can also get your ham license and start building voice radios, amplifiers and get into SDR and DMR. There has been a resurgence of that sort of thing lately. Be carefull, you may find yourself becoming an engineer before it’s over.

@Call_Me_Jay here

You can actually connect the accelerometer to the xbee directly and have an arduino on the other end turn on an LED or buzzer. No need for a computer

@LuckyGuy The buzzer disks sound promising. I want to make the project cheap and simple.

@ARE_you_kidding_me Thank you, but I don’t want to wire LEDs to three different apartments. Buzzers are annoying.

This isn’t to tell people when their laundry is done. This is so they can check if the machines are free or not.

I’m thinking an accelerometer on each machine, and an Arduino with wifi that texts or changes a file when the state changes.

I’ve just started thinking about it, after seeing something on Hackaday. I’ve never touched an Arduino before, so the goal is learning as much as providing a useful service.

I did a project like that where I broadcast the temperature via bluetooth in the header every couple of min. Since it’s in the header you don’t have to pair. I had an android app that grabbed the text from the header. No need for that here just look in the bluetooth device list. It was how I hacked bluetooth to eliminate the need for pairing when relaying small bits of text. You could toggle the name free/in use or something like that. It was easy to do with bluetooth, not so sure how easy it would be with wifi but the range would be better Sparkfun.com sells good, cheap arduino bluetooth &wifi modules.

@Call_Me_Jay I used those elements for all sorts of projects. I bought the “fancy”, stainless steel disks at 15 cents each. They were only 0.45 mm thick. They were so thin they could fit under gaskets and act like knock sensors. I used one to determine if a fuel injector was closing.
If you glue it to the side of dryer it can even act like a microphone. Murata used to make them by the jillions. If you are cheap and don’t want to order any you already have a couple in your house right now! They are in smoke detectors and in the old watches you don’t use any more. You can also find one in almost every electronic kid’s toy.

Running the piezo buzzers backwards as sensors reminds me of the days of yore, using the speakers from my parents’ GE stereo as microphones.

You can find quite few of these discs on Amazon. Get the ones with leads attached. it is a pain to solder to the bare discs. 27 mm will have 4–8 times the amplitude of 20 mm.