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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Joe Barnard, who looks a bit like the energy & space entrepreneur, earning him the title among his friends of “discount Elon Musk,” is one of the very best channels among tinkerer YouTube. Not annoying or fake enthusiasm like some of the other channels (but is enthusiastic!), innovative, informative, and fun-loving. A joy to watch his videos.

Also, I had ice cream with him one time after watching an Antares launch in Virginia.

Also good to see Make isn’t dead.

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Totally agree. Very prolific with a mix of software and hardware engineering, not at all shy about showing failures and setbacks and puts a lot of effort into the production value of his content. One of my favorites on YouTube for sure. I do hope he gets into hybrid or liquid propellant to avail himself of some basic thrust control...his new test stand has me hopeful.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCILl8ozWuxnFYXIe2svjHhg

> not at all shy about showing failures and setbacks

This is the same reason why I like Alec Steele, a popular blacksmith channel! It's much more interesting to learn about all the mistakes, failures and bad assumptions than to see a perfect, finished product from end to end.

If you haven't found him already, you might like Wintergatan. Martin Molin of Wintergatan is currently in the process of designing and building a successor to a marble machine instrument he built a few years ago and is extensively documenting the process through YouTube. He doesn't shy away from showing mistakes either and all of his videos are beautifully shot and scored (often with music by him). If you are interested in engineering of any kind, I would highly recommend watching the Marble Machine X series from the start. He learns (and thus teaches) a lot of valuable lessons in the process and it is really satisfying to see it all finally coming together.

I binge-watch the MMX videos over the course of a couple of weeks a year or so ago in order to get up-to-date and have been following it since. It's been great to see the thing evolve through the challenges, setbacks, and breakthroughs. The final machine seems so close now!

He consistently does experimental things with model rockets that no one else has managed to pull off, or would even try at that scale. Reaction controls, launch tubes... he's really cutting edge, which is unusual for Youtube channels.

Second this it is been awsome to follow his journey.

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