I’m in the process of writing articles for my past projects. For many of my projects, all I have left are a few pictures and videos as they were either fly-by-wire or I lost my design notebooks.  I also had the misfortune to lose a couple hard drives, so I am missing code, schematics, simulations, and more that could have been helpful to others. I’m sorry about that, but there isn’t much I can do :/

I think that I am going to divide this site into two parts – the blog and the project pages. The blog will hold updates to my current project/s and the project pages will hold summaries of each project once they are finished.  The idea here is that the blog will serve somewhat as a design notebook and the project pages will let folks know how to build, wire, and code the final product.  This way, the folks who just want a simple “do this” can have it, and those who want to know all of the trials, failures, and why I made the decisions I did can read ALL about them.

Given that my name is displayed prominently in multiple parts of this site, I understand that this is somewhat risky – I am telling the entirety of the internet about all of my dummy mistakes, electrocutions, 2nd degree burns, shrapnel wounds from exploding capacitors, and more.  But, that is what engineering is really about. We fail. Often. Hopefully, that failure is caught in a computer simulation or in prototype stages before it is seen by the public, but we always fail.  Folks love to boast about their successes and never really like to talk about the process it took to get there, including failures and complete U-turns.  This is rather sad as the journey to how you got somewhere is usually more important than the destination.

For folks just starting in the electronics and engineering hobbies, this is especially frustrating.  They see all of these other folks coming up with super crazy inventions, 3D printers, and a whole giant mess of insanity supposedly from thin air and the newbies get overwhelmed and frustrated.  They don’t understand that they clever solution they see before them was usually a giant chunk of junk a few weeks before and has evolved.  I am hoping to change that, at least a little bit, but showing as much as I can (even though I’m sure I’m going to be the butt of a few jokes, heheh).

This post was published October 18, 2015 by Austin Steingrube. It was last updated Last updated: .