This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's really the most hellish part. I'm trying to just take it easy and not worry about how soon I get this done to avoid stressing.
Starter kits help a bit, but they're only like $10 whereas I want something like $100-200 that contains the top 1000 things people use for, e.g. Arduino or LEDs.
I fantasize about taking a two week vacation to Shenzhen and hiring some Chinese EEs that speak English to show me around and going home with a suitcase full of stuff I bought off the street.
I think that sourcing the basics, e.g. a breadboard, wired resistors, capacitors, LEDs, jumper wires, some opamps, is not that hard.
Amazon or (in Germany) Conrad have you covered there (if you don't mind overpaying compared to what the parts would cost in bulk).
If you increase your budget to 200$, then different people will want very different things. Matrix LCDs, TTL logic chips, myriads of sensors, servos. Some will want passive SMD components (with different preferences to size).
And in that stage, they probably also want components which are not sold by Conrad, which is when things get painful.
There are, of course, companies which carry zillons of electronic components, e.g. Farnell, Mouser, RS, Digikey. Their stock is well curated, you can filter based on dozens of criteria until you end up with what fits your needs. In fact, having used these websites I have come to despise the shopping experience on Amazon, where little in the way of curation happens and accessories for X regularly appear in the category X.
Alas, these electronics vendors do not typically sell to hobbyists. Presumably, cutting five chips from a reel and packing them for sale is not in itself very profitable, but simply a prerequisite to sell a reel of your chips to companies, eventually. Unlike corporations, private persons rarely scale up their projects to a scale where serious money gets spent, and complying with the consumer protection regulations is just not worth it.
So you sometimes find yourself in the situation where you know that four different companies carry the chip you want, but none of them want to sell to you. (These days, it might be possible that you can get it from China, if you don't mind the wait, though.)
Many of them do (likely because they realize that "hobbyist" might be in a position to decide where to order parts for a company in a year or two). They just have somewhat higher mailing costs which get waived if you order enough euros worth of parts at once. My hobby projects with a friend have made them more than a thousand euros worth of business by now once we expanded to making diy kits of some projects and needed multiple prototype rounds.
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You know, that really strikes at the duality of it for me. I don't want to be fucking around with arduino components like electronic legos, but then the ecosystem of all electronic components is so vast and wide and deep that you really are just adrift.
My dream for a time was to build my own 8-bit computer with some cheap 6502, VGA output and synthesizer audio as a fun learning exercise. But it turns out nobody makes VGA chips anymore? Or audio? Basically everything is SOC, and every project you see along these lines has a legit 8-bit Z80 or 6502, and then uses an SOC as a co-processor for it's VGA and sound, or has you using 20-30 year old salvaged chips.
Oh, yeah. Seems like people want small low-power computers to drive widgets rather than make an IBM PC from 1986 on a cocktail napkin.
Ideally all of this should could be end-to-end done with CAD software, or by writing out a .spec file and uploading it to a magic box or web site and then a microwave dings and it's ready. Or it arrives in the mail. Maybe one day...
Maybe it's possible to 3d print ghetto PCBs and also 3d print conductive filament and snap it into place?
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