You can Join the Build Inside the Box Challenge! Here's what's in The Box

I get an Error 404 when I click the Buy The Box button.

Nice idea, I am curious to see comments here:-) One story from me that happened in 2019.

One morning, my wife gave me a ticket to the Finnish Science Centre as she could not keep company to her teenage nephew that time. As a biologist I have been there several times, thus I did not expect to see anything special. Despite some interest in dinosaurs and anatomy, the nephew decided to skip my favourite biomedical exhibition and walked directly to the physics section, where we landed in a small but very cozy electronics laboratory. We had a lot of fun there trying to build working circuit boards and understand basics principles of current flow. Getting out of the museum, I found myself wondering: why I am not doing things that truly make me calm and happy as it was in my childhood when we fixed broken appliances with my grandpa, as it was in that electronics lab with my nephew-in-law?

That ticket changed my life... Soon after our visit, I bought an Arduino kit and start making first steps in electronics, then assembled four pump controllers for my biological laboratory and I ended up as a Bachelor student of Electronics Engineering.

Maybe, this story is not exactly what should be in this competition, but that ticket definitely turned my life into something positive and meaningful:-) Special thanks to my wife and nephew-in-law for it!

P.S. below you might see the pump controller mentioned above (the first outcome of that unexpected gift).

Thank you for sharing. So cute! and very touching.

I am a very shy person. I'm only outspoken only when things aren't personal to me. If I have to express things that actually matter to me, I turn into this quivering mess of a person.

So last summer, when the pandemic lockdowns were starting to be enacted, my uncle and his family came to live with us. My uncle is the kind of man who would scam an old lady if he thought he could get away with it. He is manipulative, arrogant and extremely selfish. For half the summer he bullied me for this and that. He would sneakily steal my portions of food and give them to my cousins. He would say extremely rude and insulting things about my hair and clothes. He would force me to do petty works for him even if his own children were completely free at the moment.

My mom noticed all this but she couldn't say anything because she still wanted to maintain an air of politeness. Without anyone to defend me the entire summer, I had to learn to defend myself. I started standing up for myself. I started talking back instead of just taking the abuse. By the end of the summer, I had become a more confident stronger version of myself who was no longer shy about expressing things dear to me. What my uncle did to me was terrible and unexpected but I had taken it and (subconsciously ) turned it into something positive. It wasn't a great experience but it was certainly enlightening.

OK then. In 2006 my wife was pregnant with our 3rd child, and had a miscarriage at 19 weeks. We were devasted and it was really hard to keep things together. But we had to, as there were the first two kids to be taken care of. We had the body cremated, and it came back in a tiny urn, maybe 2 inches tall and 3/4 inch around. Our youngest was around 3 at the time, and liked going to Build a Bear Workshop. While we were there, we got the idea of putting the urn inside one of the stuffed animals. We took him around with us everywhere, and both kids understood that he wasn't a toy to play with, but part of the family. We got pregnant again the following year and had our 3rd child. The stuffed dog literally went everywhere with us for years, even on vacation. This picture is a shot from 2010 in Hawaii.

So we turned it into a positive, although that child wasn't directly in our lives he was in a way, and we all learned a lesson in handling grief and moving forward.

It's alright if something isn't an exact fit to the question It's the spirit of the thing.

Darn, Christopher has a great one. I can think of times overcoming adversity, and turning things positive but the "received something you didn't know what to do with" part is throwing me.

Sneaky choice of op amp - rail to rail output but not rail to rail input - watch out competitors !

Much too busy to play at the moment - mega work project with June deadline looms !

MK

I can't enter this competition, but I still feel like joining in...

> Tell us about a time that you received something you didn't know what to do with, and how you were able to turn that into something positive or meaningful in your life.

My sibling got me a present for Christmas that I wasn't expecting... it was an 'optical illusion' kit, and it was rather... primitive, to put it politely. I wondered what on earth they were thinking and whether or not it was a gag gift (they're the type to do that..) but I really didn't know what to do with it.

Still, a gift is a gift is a gift, I kept hold of it, and left it in the car... some time after I attended a friend's birthday party, of which their family attended, and their nephews and nieces were also there but were getting rather board, and so I was tasked with entertaining them...

Cue the optical illusion kit to save the day, making zoetropes, spinning toys that did very basic animations, flip books, persistence of vision light tricks.. it was enthralling and they learnt something too

I'll admit chances like that don't come along a lot, but it was useful and although the gift wasn't perfect for me, it was perfect to entertain everyone in the end