Re: hobby electronics

On 7/3/2024 6:34 AM, BillGill wrote:

On 7/3/2024 4:30 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

Go looking at maker-spaces or whatever they are called in the US. Most of them will be trying to make electric guitars but they will be showing at least some skills with small pickup coils and low noise amplifiers.

 Here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA we have a Maker Faire
every August (Saturday, August 24, this year).
 I have been going regularly, in fact I have shown my
stuff (how to digitize a print book) for several years.

Do you have a pointer to that information (looking for tips that
I may not have discovered as I've been digitizing my dead trees)?

They have a lot of interesting stuff, but not the sort
of thing this thread has been talking about.  Lots of
foods, drones, and other stuff, such as costumes.

A young lady at the local maker house builds (feathered) "wings"
on pneumatic actuators.  Think: cosplay.

But not much in the way of stuff built from electronic
components, unless you count the small computers used to
controls the working systems.
 I think somebody has said that by using the various small
computers you can do a lot more complex things than you
can with individual components.  That is why you don't see
many things that use individual components.

There is very little cost to making mistakes when writing code.
Unless you are controlling some mechanism and have failed to
correctly implement "limits", things just "don't work right"
and you can try again.  And, you likely already have all of
the "special tools" to do so, at no added cost.
I have an exercise for students to program a robot to
traverse a maze.  We only have *one* real robot (a 400 pound
affair that needs to be transported in a van!).  So, getting
time on THE robot is hard to come by.
OTOH, I can design a simulator/arena and create (or, let the
students create!) mazes that they can "navigate" without
the need for that big mechanism.  They can explore hundreds
of different approaches to maze solving (because solving also
has a cost associated!) in a day; whereas the physical robot
would require minutes to physically navigate ONE maze.
They can share their implementations to see how a particular
implementation fares in a particular maze (that they may not
have imagined in their development)
However, seeing their algorithm control a REAL mechanism is
incredibly exciting!  And, watching them wonder how their
classmates' algorithms will perform, given that they only
see the resulting actions, not the code behind them!
[We're working on another "robot battle" application that
will allow head-to-head competition, of sorts.  Kids like
seeing devices *act*, not just blink lights or scribble on
a screen]