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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3872 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 3, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Any ideas for small electrical things that you use regularly that would make a good Project?

I've been running some students through designing a macropad variant, and someone in the tumblr rat-adj-adj sphere is building a small timer. But a lot of the field, including things I've run as student projects before, tend to be toys.

I like your basic two-wheel robot as much as the next person, but it's something that at best you make, put on the shelf, and never touch again. Same for infinity mirrors, and the best that can be said for epaper weather stations is that at least they'll change on the shelf. Or, alternatively, there's a ton of projects to build something that's really useful for somebody who wants to be an electrical engineer and needs something that'll work until they can buy a Real Tool.

Ideally, I'd have students long enough to see what they'd want, but I've gotten a lot of shrugs, or worse questions for stuff that seems deceptively easy (forget the ethics of DIY AppleTags, the TI MSP430 library for LoRA suuuuuuucks). And in more cases, I don't really have the timelines for it, as hilariously enough even if we're getting circuit boards done as students finish the CAD, I need to have the non-jellybean parts ordered months in advance or they'll get in slower than OSHPark or JLCPCB can turn something around.

Temperature monitoring on devices has saved me more heartache than any other project. The latest one was getting an alert my fridge-freezer was failing in time to shut it down and fix before the compressor exploded (fridge overheating, freezer over-cooling, stupid stupid active vent systems)

On the plus side now we know my freezer can get itself to -40F if it wants.

That’s a good one, especially since a lot of mainstream gear in that space depends on annoying IoT stuff.

Downside is it's not exactly sexy unless you have a Monitoring Things fetish, and the practical side doesn't show up until it alerts you to a problem.

Yeah, it'd not be the sort of thing you could just plug in and make magic happen, but I could see a good lesson plan talking about cycles of temperature or relative humidity.

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