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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3458 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.

The problem is that almost anything which would be widely useful can already be found for less than you would pay for the parts on aliexpress, and will likely offer better battery life and miniaturization. Especially the latter is a big deal for wearables -- while you can certainly use an ESP32, a EKG chip and some flash memory to build a two channel 24/7 Holter EKG, it will certainly not have the neat chest strap form factor but something much bulkier. Also, most of your students probably don't require an EKG in any case.

Home automation is one area where DIY can thrive, especially for cloud-skeptics like me who don't like to surrender control to Amazon or Google. Devices there can often be mains-powered and a bit larger. Commercial products often are not very great on generic interfaces and instead prefer for you to download the app and use their cloud.

All of the devices which I have build which ended up being useful are for very specific things in the lab. A tester to check if there are sixteen diodes connected to specific pins of a DSub25 connector is not exactly an item you require in every household.

I personally would not worry if student electronics projects end up in some drawer. It is the same with most smaller student software projects. Nobody would want to hang whatever pictures I was forced to draw in high school on their walls, and most student essays don't enter the canon either.

Regarding buying electronic components, I have found it really helpful to have the backing of a corporation or institution. Most of the electronics vendors like farnell, mouser, digikey, buerklin really don't like to do business with private individuals. This means that for plenty of chips there is not even a good way to buy them at all on your own. When purchasing through an institution, I can get the products from at least two of these vendors within a week or so. Of course, if you want really exotic sensors you might have to buy directly from the producer, but the palette they offer is rather large.

Maybe a computer mouse or something like an NES controller for playing retro games? Alternatively some kind of optical scanner that can read barcodes/QR codes for data retrieval.

Maybe a computer mouse or something like an NES controller for playing retro games?

Doable, though I'd need to step up on 3d printing for anything usable for the longer term. Retro gaming's a lot more hit or miss than I would have expected for a lot of the teenagers I get, though.

Alternatively some kind of optical scanner that can read barcodes/QR codes for data retrieval.

Barcodes is possible. QR codes are rough: either you're using a prebuilt module for the heavy lifting and just spits out a boring (usually UART) stream, putting a RaspPi in a box, or you're throwing camera focus and bulk memory management and illumination all in at once on a microcontroller project.

Displaying changing QR codes on ePaper or oled displays aren't too hard. Dunno if that's anything students would useful.

not answering your question, but... combined powerbank + keyboard + wrist exerciser + crank energy generator

The issue with lithium ion batteries is that they contain rather a lot of energy. I would always prefer to use a prebuilt charging circuit rather than relying on building my own, just like I try to avoid building anything complicated which directly interfaces with mains power.

did I write something suggesting implementing your own charging circuit? sounds like you do not want this in the first place. Oh if many wanted it, it'd be on market already.

Hmmmmmmm....

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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