DIY gadgetry | Hacker News Reader

DIY gadgetry

news.bbc.co.uk

15 pointsjefffoster8 comments

At the London hackspace we are mostly software people who want a space to hang out and hack away on projects. The BBC turned up on the night that tinker.it had donated a bunch of arduinos and various hardware bits such as leftovers from their toy-hacking workshop. It seems the beeb jamp to the conclusion that we are a group of garbage scavengers rather than social hackers and crafters.

"a colour-changing lamp that shows the weather."

Nice, but not that useful. I'd like to learn more electronics and probably will have to go through the "blinking LEDs" stage, too. Coming up with more useful stuff to create (on amateur level) doesn't seem so easy, though. Even Adafruit seems to mostly sell gimmicks or modules for other gimmicks, which worries me a bit.

Even musical instruments don't excite me much: couldn't everything they do be done in software instead?

Maybe it is time to start thinking in some completely new directions? For example I have been wondering if it would be at all feasible to create one's own e-ink display?

It takes a lot of imagination to use these gadgets creatively. Fortunately there are people out there who can pull it off: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/gallery_embroidery/4/

Also, e-ink is REALLY expensive, about 10x more than OLED, even.

That's why I thought maybe one could create the actual e-ink displays by oneself, not play with existing ones. I wouldn't even know how to get started, and probably it is completely infeasible - just trying to start thinking in different directions.

I only recently started with some soldering on kits and it was really fun, so I don't want to complain. I'd just like to find something useful to do with it (for beginning, I just wanted to practice soldering and did not even care much about the resulting gadget).

Take a look at what http://www.sparkfun.com has to offer. They make alot of adapter boards so that the more interesting devices (eg. accelerometers) are accessible to hackers without smt soldering skills.

Here's the thing, though. When you're a beginner in just about any field, the first few things you build aren't very useful. They are good for learning, but that's it. Once you get beyond a certain point, you can build stuff that can actually be used for something.

These days I'm mostly into high power LEDs (just built a small battery-powered light for my tent and now I'm working on an LED headlamp). LEDs are fun to play with, and even at a beginner level are quite useful -- an exception to what I said above!

Probably going to put this stuff on a new site, and move my LED tutorials there with a few simple projects. If you want a heads-up when it's ready, contact me through my profile.

Not sure, for example with JavaScript it seems one could create some useful Greasemonkey Scripts with very few lines of code. But then I am not a beginner in web technologies, so maybe for a complete beginner it looks completely different.

The LED stuff definitely sounds interesting!

I'm currently playing with an Arduino, I'm only at the traffic lights stage, which feels very "Hello World", but I enjoy it. It's very refreshing to think that I can start building my own hardware to interface with a computer. I've spent years writing software and it makes a nice change to make something tangible using the programming skills I already have.

I agree, the colour changing lamp isn't that useful by itself but learning how to make one would be fun. It's a nice hobby to have. There's something satisfying about building something yourself.

The limitations seem endless, but it's coming up with practical ideas that I think is the really tricky thing.

Stuff like the Baker Tweet - http://www.bakertweet.com/ have a lot of potential.

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