What’s the coolest ‘just for the joy of engineering’ project you’ve ever made, and how did you pull it off? We are asking e14 in our Join, Share & Win Competition

I did with Lego parts when I was a teenager. You had to turn the hand crank, it would move lots of things, but in the end, it was all for nothing...

Who ever made a useless machine?

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I have recently gotten back into making after a recovery and taking a break from posting and filming....eventually I will start to produce again but what really got me recently is a few projects I always wanted to do. 

First I enjoy getting old copies of Popular Electronics and read them from time to time.   I look at the projects and wonder how I would build them today.  my first one was the Princeps puzzle on the Arduino Uno R3 this was so much fun.

The next project recently that I really enjoyed working on was a project that I am still working on well the next 2 are anyways but this one has to be alot of fun I wanted to find out something to do with my decade box or resistor box and use it for fun so I created this bad boy its a game its a learning tool and I think I made 3 games for it once again on the arduino uno r3 I could have used newer boards I have laying around but something about the R3 just still makes me smile. I still have not printed a case for it but I might do a bit of a redesign and upgrades on it yet.

Finally one for just pure silly fun is creating a Magnetic Generator cause free energy lol.   anyways it was fun I wrote a python program for creating custom gears and all the parts I would need so I didn't have to buy anything and then just used GT2 pulley belt and joined it together but still working on it but its not always the things that work that enjoy when I create it its also the stuff that didn't work and I know this one is a bit of a reach but non less its fun and I enjoyed every second of it and still am. 

as I look on my shelf I see a bunch more but theses are the ones I am currently working on and playing with there is one more I am pretty proud of but dont have any pictures of it right now. 

wait I lied here is one but its further along than this and its pretty cool more on this one soon. 

Oh and usually I do alot of Raspberry Pi projects.....those are still happening and so much fun but I have been on an arduino kick lately. 

That being said the most of the projects I do on the community weather for myself or for a competition and so on I find I push myself to different limits when I am coming up with something to post on the community so far its worked out in my favour as I have learnt so much over the years building random projects I wouldn't have built otherwise. 

Happy Making everyone and lets see more projects! 

robogary I know that there are some that are blessed that way... I was not.  Mom and Dad worked.  We had to figure stuff out on our own - classic Gen X upbringing.  Interests were self-derived and self-pursued.  I grew up in a dying mill town where ambition had left decades before and people guarded what little they knew like Smeagol and his precious ring.  They acted like sharing knowledge was akin to giving away the only power that they had.  Old, old mill mentality.  Inspiration came from a bookstore in the mall, the library or an infrequent story from somebody else's parent or relative.  And the real ugly truth is that my "hometown" has actually gotten much, much worse with the proliferation of recreational marijuana.  It's quite sad.

A few years ago I designed a fantasy processor (i.e: An architecture that doesn't exist), and implemented a virtual machine on Arduino (so the Arduino would "emulate" this processor together with some hardware like a screen, an SD card for storage and an external memory) and also wrote a PC emulator and debugger for development together with my own assembler/linker for writing code for this machine, and I was working on a C compiler for it when I started struggling to find time (and motivation) more and more, and eventually abandoned it.

The instruction set was capable enough to implement various math algorithms (I tried the typical recursion tests, factorial, etc) as well as handling moving memory fast enough to do graphics and basic effects like scrolling.

Here's a video of a demo I wrote for that machine showcasing scrolling graphics, running on my emulator/debugger:

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Video of the same demo running on a physical implementation of the processor and bare-bones hardware:

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This was definitely a case of an over-engineered project. But I wanted to see if I was able to design a minimalist yet feature-full instruction set that could result in a relatively fast execution and minimal code size, even when implemented on slow devices with little to no RAM. This would allow me to, for example, create projects that I could port instantaneously to different dev boards, and that it could be run sandboxed and loaded from external devices. This could have even been the foundations for creating a minimal multi-platform Operating system for embedded microcontrollers, able to load programs from disk or external media, and multitask between programs even in devices that do not allow for code to be loaded from outside their program memory.

The instruction set went through several iterations before I was happy with it and started building tools (like the assembler and the debugger) that could test its implementation so I worked on this for over a year (although there were months were little to no progress was made because I had little to no time for it).

My daughter was at university completing her education degree. She wanted my help to build what she called an Attention Focus Box for an analysis project she proposed. The hand-held box contained one LED, a three-position slider, and a push button. The goal was that the box would help students learn to focus.

The slider set a timer 1min, 3min & 5min. When the button was pushed, the timer would run down and turn on the LED. The student was asked to focus on a task until the light came on. Start with the lowest timer and work their way up.

Retirement was novel then; this project was simple. The initial year involved navigating life without a job. Despite my formal training as an electronic engineering technologist, I worked in IT security toward the end of my career. I was trying to revive that past education building electronics stuff for model railroaders. 

I recall using a 9V battery with a Nano in a plastic box I had kicking around. The switch was a challenge. This was long before I developed order parts and invested in proper builds. I just butchered old items to get parts. I’m trying to think of what I used for the box. I remember the battery sliding in nicely, and gaffer tape held the case together. I never thought to take pictures and document it. It was pretty crude compared to what I could do today with the skills I developed and the tools I have learned.

My daughter completed the project. I assume she did because she graduated:) Her typical answer when I try to engage her in conversation is Yes, OK and you know dad. She talked about how the student she was working with really needed the help. “That is why she came up with the idea,” she said. She told me it was working until it became a distraction for other students who wanted the box with the light as well.

My Grandfather was a woodworker, metalworker and general innovator.  When we had the opportunity to visit, I loved to hang out in his shop with him and tinker with his scraps and pieces.  He was a huge part of me choosing engineering as a profession.

When you were a kid, did you have a parent or grandparent with a passion for an activity they shared with you ? 

That earphone is from a Science Fair xxx-in-one kit <3

kmikemoo said:

I wanted the grandkids to actually learn from the experience.

I think perhaps that the 1st version achieves that... 'this is what it is like when someone hacks your electric car and operates it remotely...'