I've fallen in love with arduinos. There's so many things you can do with these little microcontrollers and so many modular circuits and sensors available nowadays that you can build practically anything for cheap. It feels like I blinked my eyes on the advancing of availability of shit like this and it went from a bunch of hobbyists sharing schematics on forums to being able to order anything you want out of china for a few dollars. Crazy shit. I'm patiently waiting for a handful of nanos, IMUs, and bluetooth controllers to play with for VR experiments.

Yeah, totally would not have messed with that wood putty tho.

Don't get me wrong, I like arduino as a tool for (design) education, but they are really bad.

They trivialise the electrical engineering, which takes time and in general, should be done properly. There's quite a bit of electrical noise and unreliability due to arduino being used, without taking care of proper electrical signaling.

They are badly made, even though they do have their merits. New versions are getting better, though. The fact that they are easy to use does not diminish the downsides.

I did my PhD focusing on the intersection of electrical engineering and design education.

Look Buddy, If I want to plug this arduino into the wall and then use it to automatically maintain a steady temperature in my bath that's my right as an American! ;)

I've no doubt that these things aren't perfect but they do increase the accessibility of working with programming and hardware control, which is no simple feat. To me, they're a slightly advanced, much more versatile version of those spring terminal kits I played with as a kid. I wouldn't use them for anything important involving life safety systems or actual manufacturing, but for what I'm using them for they'll do the job pretty well. Which in most cases, it's either something that's not commercially available or is priced so obscenely high that I could never afford it.

I'll keep your words in mind for future projects though. I do gotta say, I was an Electronic Tech in the Navy back in the 90s and quality-wise the arduinos I've gotten my hands on have been grades above anything I worked on back then. ;)

No probs there, and do use them as much as you want. ^_^b

I use arduino as well, quite a bit. It's not meant (or should not be meant) for anything other than initial prototyping. There are however services, which allow you to create a "commercial quality pcb:s" from your designs, (e.g. fritzing, (argh) ) which are at the core of the problem. They make it easy to create boards that can be assembled and sold, based on a breadboard-assembly. That is not a good thing, since anyone with a little bit of tinkering experience can then create potentially dangerous things.

Anyway, I'll leave now and go outside to yell at the passing clouds. Or something.

Lol, I could totally see a problem with that... but I can't promise I'll never do that either. :D

Most of what I've run across that I can build though are just mixing and matching of ready made circuit modules. Like aliexpress has some IMUs that are like 2 bucks a pop that I just realized can be setup on a 2wire bus and possibly be used for creating a crude fullbody tracker for VR. Wire that thing up to an arduino with a HC-06 bluetooth module and in theory I can do a very rough $50 version of what would normally cost thousands. I can't pass up the chance at that. Or I'm in the middle of making a Project Emma clone that I plan on open sourcing. It's hardware that's out there and could do good, but microsoft isn't selling anytime soon.

Lol! Now that I think about it, how you feel about the arduino is probably how I feel about the SE codebase. ;)

Have you seen the latest raspberry pi?

Somewhat familiar with the Pi Zero W as I've been looking at the Orange Pi Zero on aliexpress, haven't really seen anything about the 4 but rumors yet.

I'm a DIY guy and the cost for those parts made that project prohibitive for myself for just a clock, maybe later.

At least 1/3 of that cost is this Guy laser cutting walnut and then he goes and slathers putty on it.

He also spent $30 on teak oil. 😒

Confirmed: we have reached teak oil.

Holy smokes he paid a lot to encase that....I myself would just design a box and print it out...lol. I got a whole spool of wood PLA for that.

To be fair, dude is in Singapore so he probably had to pay for shipping etc too :/

This is like spending six months painstakingly crafting and assembling a precision mechanical pocketwatch out of rare metals

and then hot-glueing the innards of a Seiko digital watch to it.

To be honest I would of encased those in an Apollo era type avionics enclosure painted zinc chromium, black, and grey paints. This display was pure cold war missile stuff not captain nemo.

Ya, I thought at least tin or something might be nice.

Aaaaaand now I've gone and bought a Nixie tube clock for my new house.

Fucksocks.

(But it's soooo cool!)

Fucksocks.

(Diesel punk! I remember these tubes from when I was a kid! So cool!)

Fucksocks...

It's super cool though huh. Don't forget to slather it in wood putty.