Hackaday Hack Chat: Finishing Your Projects

are we live come on youtube we are live ladies gentlemen and cyborgs how is it going i'm zach friedman uh welcome to uh welcome to the hack chat i'm not late i am right on time uh it is such an honor and a pleasure to uh to be on this uh i'm not sure not sure how many folks know this but hackaday huh it's on a lag i'm not sure how uh i'm not sure how many folks know this but hackaday is the reason why i got into building stuff in the first place uh it uh like i wasn't even aware that like there were hobbyists that built things uh until i saw this project for building a heads-up display uh on hackaday and uh this was like the days of google google reader so like i immediately like subscribed to everything hack related i can find and that got me uh well like that kind of got me where i am today uh this heads-up display is kind of the culmination of that and i guess i would say that this the fact that even have this channel at all kind of is directly uh directly related to that anyways you came here to find out about finishing projects and a long time ago like back when i first got started doing this i was really bad at finishing projects i i um i didn't like i went to engineering school but i didn't really pass any of my engine engineering classes so uh i was pretty much all self-taught so i just kept jumping into situations over and over again where i had no idea what i was getting into and uh most of those projects were abandoned or i would just move on and it it really did take years and years for me to get to a point where i was actually finishing most of what i started uh i would argue that it wasn't even until i got serious about youtube that i got into that mindset of everything i start must be finished quickly so uh it is such an honor to be here um on the other end of on the other end of that i kind of feel like i've made it you know uh anyways you guys came with questions uh i'm ready for answers if you are watching this on youtube uh be aware that i'm gonna be answering most of the questions on hackaday io so uh check the pinned comment for that if you're watching this on hackaday io uh you are not hearing a word i'm saying right now but you know i'm not answering there i'm answering here if you're watching this later hello future i hope uh i hope it's as good as i uh hope it's as good as i want it to be so without further ado let's get chatting about finishing your projects our first question comes from ina who asks someone once gave me the advice not to talk about your projects too much since that positive feeling you get from getting your idea acknowledged makes you feel like you already accomplished it this is this is pretty this is a great question uh this is a real psychological phenomenon where basically telling someone your idea uh basically telling someone uh no not your idea so much but talking through the project or really any goal you intend to do uh gives you some of the pleasure finishing it so it can actually kill motivation down the line this is a real psychological phenomenon uh and it can it can affect it can't affect things i this this is tricky because uh it might in my personal opinion i don't have data to back this up but i don't believe this applies as much to projects as if there were electronics there was prototyping electronics there was writing code not to mention all of the uh doc not to mention all the the documentation stuff brooke i have nothing i can do about that what on earth could i possibly do about that anyways uh there's nothing i could do about my uh my internet connection um yeah i would say uh tell people about your projects uh especially if you're unfamiliar with what you're getting yourself into uh also brooke i love you i love you too i'm not i'm not sure what i'm expecting to do about a slow internet connection uh yeah so especially if you don't know what you're getting into it's great to talk about your projects because uh you might get you might some basically they might point something out that will uh they'll get in your way on top of that the delay between when you start a project and when you finish the project is usually so long and so hard that you kind of need every bit you can get um that said if you're the type of person who finds yourself doing this often uh experiment try stu you know like don't don't be so forthcoming about your uh about the stuff you're working on uh by the way the original study i believe talked about runners uh people who were people who were starting like i think people who are starting like like daily running they found that when they talk to people about the fact that they're running they ran for fewer days and uh i think this is um i just i i my suspicion is that this has less to do with uh with like electronics projects but who knows uh but that said uh there's a corollary to this which is don't feel like you have to hide your idea uh no if someone's first off someone steals your idea that's you are so unbelievably unlucky uh that happens so rarely i like i've had like 100 000 subscribers for months now and i'm pretty sure only like three people have actually reproduced any of my projects uh if you're trying to make money off it uh if you're that you have to talk to people about you have to reality check your idea so if you're worried about people stealing it and commercializing it file a provisional patent but do whatever it takes to get the word out right now the concept of hype and surprise doesn't exist in 2020. there are no such things as spoilers anymore talk right now trust me uh let's let's see let's see our second uh let's find another question here uh oh i got some i got someone hooked on an sla printer yes resin uh resin master race uh now it's my responsibility to let you know which one you'd say is a good starter this is relevant to finishing projects having the right tools is is important otherwise you spend project time working on your tool i use the frozen sonic mini 4k i think it's an excellent machine uh i would recommend for resin pretty much any monochrome printer uh is good i think the any cubic uh the any cubic mono is a really good bang for the buck uh things for around like 250 bucks it's really powerful really fast get a monochrome printer if you're getting an ftm printer like i've made my love of perugia printers known pretty pretty far and wide i wouldn't recommend anything else but whatever it is remember that when you get a garbage tool especially a 3d printer i don't mean garbage so much but like if you get a low end tool they cut corners and some of those corners they cut could be relevant to your project if you try to save too much money on your tools you're going to waste time that would otherwise go into your project uh let's see we got some real all right all right here we go ajb 2k3 not not a question but says in most cases real life is the biggest issue preventing finishing projects that is i i don't think that's i can't say that's inaccurate because yes it's true but when when folks say that real life got in the way what you're actually saying is that you have poor time management real life gets in the way by uh putting new tasks in your hands that you put by throwing new tasks in your lap that you don't have time uh to work on and uh basically that mean like that means you just haven't finished the project fast enough the the longer the project goes the higher the chance that life will get in the way it doesn't matt this has nothing to do with difficulty either it's simply that for every unit of time that passes there's a chance that you get hit by a car uh your toilet overflows your uh you you have to take care of the of your cup of your uh your you have to take care of your cousin's kids you know all that stuff when you start a project finish it as quickly as possible uh if the even still you should always be trying to structure your project so that you are instead of doing a lot of work and then project over you are sort of making a project and improving it like sort of mini projects that way you can stop at any time if real life gets in the way you just you know you hit the eject button and uh you know of a working project uh so if you feel like real life is getting in the way of your projects move your schedule like try to rearrange your projects so that you finish things faster it'll give fewer opportunities for life to uh to get in the way uh let's let's see okay we got some uh we we have some youtube comments here uh i am gonna be answering most of my questions on hackaday.io but uh we'll feel the occasional youtube question or two uh retro telephone asked a zack of youtube comments streaming to his eyeball unfortunately no uh the the computer that this thing is attached to is running this like android like eight or something and youtube won't actually run on it i have a timer going on it so i can make sure i don't put too much time into any individual questions so that everyone gets uh everyone gets a chance um let's see oh sallo barbaro solo barbosa olivier asks are you making a living with youtube only that's not a project question come on i am making a living with youtube only uh it's it's tricky the channel's not large enough to fully support it but let's let's let's look at some project questions oh this is an excellent one jordan brandis asks do you find that you usually work alone what are your views on teams versus solo work this is an excellent question nearly every one of my projects i work on in complete i work on completely alone and i mean that in the strictest sense of the word i don't ask questions on stack overflow i don't get in touch with other people i like i i rarely ask for help um my mentality is always like instead of asking for help i just try to i just try to backtrack and find a different way around i don't think that's necessarily a good thing i think it's more like pathology than strategy um but you know it is what it is i will say that when you're working with a team you have to make absolute certain first off that everyone in your team is busting their butt as hard as you are basically and the team has to work well together too you can't you quickly lose the benefits of working as a team uh if you guys are bickering and in fighting or even simply disagreeing time spent talking is not time spent building uh another aspect of working with a team is that you have to remember you have to be very careful in that if somebody had the more team members have unique skills or have a unique ability like have happen have enough time to put in a lot of brute force the higher chance that anything goes wrong in any of their lives and knocks them out of the project remember what i said before about the longer a project goes the higher chance life gets in the way well multiply that by the number of critical team members and basically you've got a formula that you have to finish this project absolutely immediately or something will happen to one of your teammates if you are working with a team either finish the project like in like in a flash or make sure the teammates are interchangeable personally i have a hard time working with teams uh i just don't i tend to think of things in a scatter shot way that doesn't lend itself to doesn't really lend itself well to collaborating uh is it good or bad i don't it's probably bad but i i it's too deep and great in my personality i'm too too insecure to ask to ask people for help if i'm if i'm asking someone for help i am deep in the doo-doo uh yeah that's if you have the ability to work in teams i would recommend it uh you have in return for having a higher chance of life blowing the project to pieces you also have a you have a vastly reduced chance of something completely blocking you remember in order for something to completely block the project it has to block all the team members uh so you can often make your way through things another aspect to remember oh man this is a great question is that the more people are in the team the less creative you'll be uh humans always reach consensus uh and unless your team is electric team has a tremendous number of people in it who uh have are who aren't really vulnerable to this which is rare uh you will find consensus building and design by committee taking root in the team a team just works better when it's a bunch of people supporting one person so that one person can splash out not have to justify themselves to everyone else uh if you are in a team by the way uh make sure that make sure you're paying attention to people who you never hear from everyone has an opinion and if you haven't heard from someone in a while it's not that they don't have an opinion it's that they're being trampled over uh i could talk about this the whole time but uh i have to i have to take some other some other cues let's see oh obvious uh matthew b barthet asks uh obvious birthday obvious question what do i need to start making projects where do i go for ideas and advice the ideas part i would uh the ideas part i'm actually making an entire episode that's gonna be saturday's episode hopefully i can make it on saturday uh it's gonna be about how i come up with ideas and how i refine them and get them to a point where i can build projects uh where do you go for advice personally i don't but i i mean it's going to sound very self-serving but my discord is awesome i know we have a few of my discord members here and i just created that as a way to like promote my videos if youtube ever cans me but it's turned into like just a really genuinely supportive community and we have members you can ping if you ask specific questions i prefer a chat over like a forum or anything because what you really want is to get in one of those one-on-one discussions and like just talk it through like five minutes of just one-on-one chatting tends to beat the hell out of uh tends to beat the hell out of like weeks of waiting around for people to answer online if you have a hacker space you should absolutely get to the hackerspace don't ask the hackerspace like do you will you teach me how to do this will you show me how to do this do members work together on this because the answers will all probably be no instead join the hackerspace just show up ask people show up again ask people more uh yeah and what do you need to start making projects well you need the mater you need the materials uh am i uh like i've been told my audio is very low uh allow me to uh let me do let me crank up the the tunes literally oh there we go uh yeah my levels look right over here so uh if you're still having you're still having some issues you know re raise the roof uh to start making projects you're gonna need time uh more than you think you'll need you should budget three to four times as much time as you think you'll need you'll need money uh you have to buy all your materials i always recommend uh when you're buying materials by two extra or 20 more of every single component remember these components won't go to waste because you're already using them in one project there's no reason why you wouldn't use them in another and also make sure you keep time and schedule open you can't jam pack a schedule because you need some wiggle room to spot opportunities and to deal with things that go wrong nope no plan is ever perfect uh but like what's what's the quote no war has ever been won according to plan but no battle has ever been won without one uh yeah the the best if you're just getting started the best thing you can do is to pick a project that's uh that's reasonable uh when in other words you want a project that has as little math and science and real engineering as possible it's fine if it has lots of soldering or a lot of 3d printing or a lot of you know or is expensive what you don't want is something that requires you to write a complicated algorithm or learn something that's cutting edge or like work with a weird tool chain yeah uh chalmers asks how do you deal with partners backing out of projects well ideally your partner shouldn't back out out of projects um if your partners have integrity they'll give you enough advance notice before they eject that uh you can replace them or wind their work down uh but that said like if you're in a team it's your responsibility to know what's going on inside uh your teammates heads and on their on their schedules uh it's up to you to decide uh it's up to you it's up to you to figure out whether they are likely to jump or not uh unfortunately that unfortunately comes to the territory like remember that any in anything with a group you're the only person who will like uh because of like diffusion of responsibility basically no one takes action first in a group because everyone thinks someone else will do it so if you're ever in a group remember that you personally are the one who has to take action because because no one else will i know it's it's a bummer um yeah a post a transcript oh i dan says he'll post a transcript on the chat i i feel bad forever has to do that all right let's see oh we have we have a question from youtube uh ethan's dad marcus asks would you say you're so good at finishing projects because of your great focus uh because i'm working a wearable computer um no i'm terribly unfocused i have adhd and even with medication it's really hard the the only way i can focus is by eliminating other distractions so i have a very rigid i only i'm very rigid about only working on two projects at a time and unfortunately i've had to break that recently because we're moving and i've had to stack three projects on top of each other and it's not it's not a pleasant experience i'll tell you that but uh i try to only have two projects going at once and if i if i'm working on two projects and a new idea comes along i either have to write it down and move on or have to scrap one of my existing projects i'm very rigid about that and i think it forces me to just finish up and and move on i think it's i think in on top of this uh this is tricky to say but uh basically youtube has forced me to move my projects along at an astronomical uh an astronomical rate uh before like projects that i would do for clients in three weeks and i would do for myself in one week of busting my ass i now have to do in like two days so it's it's it's pretty uh it's pretty fun uh let's see um uh jim bro jim brawny asks how do you decide which project to start if you have multiple in mind uh the i always i do generally have a huge number of i usually have a huge number of ideas like swirling around uh what happens though is that none of them motivate me to actually get moving uh instead something happens in the real world that hooks onto one of these ideas and drags it out for instance like i've wanted to build mechanical keyboards for ages and i was i had to record an episode that involved 3d printing uh hey now is a great time to build that mechanical keyboard i've had this idea for uh i've had this idea for like feel for like feeling electricity for ages and it wasn't until i needed to connect something to this vibrating wristband that i'm like maybe now is the time to look into this i think the thunder finger that that vibrating uh wristband that i made to detect current is actually a great exemplar of this because at the time i came up with the idea i didn't think it was possible uh that was one of the rare times where i got into where i got into a project before knowing the exact shot to i don't like starting a project until i feel like until like i feel like i know exactly what i'm building i don't like having to flounder around i don't like learning new things i do it only as a last resort and that project i went in expecting to uh expecting to learn new things it's kind of kind of neat uh michael murillo asks do you use a pdm tool uh personal data management for solo projects how do you organize the knowledge you accrue i've been using atlassian tools but it's not geared towards solo engineering you're going to hate me for saying this but it's all in here i find that any idea any solid idea i have i'll come up with over and over again uh any any st i i just see i just have this encyclopedic memory of the properties of nearly everything i've encountered uh i do as as a backup i do keep now keep a list of video ideas because if i need a video idea like when you get stressed you're less creative so i keep this list of ideas so that if i'm in a stressful situation and i need a video idea i can just yank one out but pretty much pretty much it's all in here i don't really make sketches unless what i'm doing is so confusing and complex and things have to be added in a certain order then i'll write it down just so that when i get deep in the zone i uh i remember to do things correctly but it's really all it's really all up here uh let's see uh vincent asks do you ever get a flood of ideas all at once in the middle of another project if so where do you keep them until you're ready to start the next project i do have a list of all right so i do i do have a list of uh project ideas on evernote but i don't believe i've ever actually looked at it i in fact um yeah i i don't think i've ever actually read it um i don't know why i put things on it uh if i come up with a good idea the very few ideas are that good that i'm like all right that's it eject i'm undoing all this work and throwing it all in the trash so that i can get started on this very few ideas are that good i'll just keep it in the back burner and i'll keep thinking about it it'll keep simmering away on the stove uh i got the i got the the themed mug too i got the shirt and the mug uh it's um i don't really get i don't know like i feel like some people are just overwhelmed by like the urge to make a prod a project i i don't i don't think that really happens so much anymore because like i immediately start spinning through what it'll take to actually implement it and that generally like you know throws a wet blanket on it um i don't really i don't really get burning desires to build something specific anymore uh it's more like trying to match the right opportunity with the right uh project i thought i was thinking something really interesting there and i can't uh i can't remember what it was we were talking about project uh oh i think a lot of people have this fear that they'll a lot of people feel like ideas are precious and they feel like if you if you don't write it down and that that that genius will leave you forever and eventually you'll hit some point in your life where you're just out of ideas and if you would only written that one down ideas are the most disposable resource available like people say that people say that trees are a renewable resource but trees take time to grow i could like put you i could like see you can come up with five ideas right now ideas are are so easy to come up with they're effectively worthless and i guarantee you that great that idea that you think is so great that you have to jump into right now you if you like if you write it down and take a look at it you know you have to wait till the next day you wait a couple hours you'll be like oh my god was i really ready to spend hundreds of hours on this ideas are disposable just chuck them out chuck them out like at will you can always come up with more of them michael chastain asks an excellent question what is your threshold for saying no to something based on not having enough experience do you do tester projects towards a larger goal the second question is absolutely if there is anything i am remotely remotely unaware of on a project i will make sure to front load that and do it before i even get it into my head that i'm building this project if there's a sensor i've never used before immediately buy it and test it if there's a micro controller i've never tried before let's let's let's fire it up i'll give myself 15 minutes if i can't get code onto it in 15 minutes it's in the trash uh my threshold for saying no to something is extremely low uh basically if if there is literally anything in the project that i haven't done before i need a really solid reason why i'm doing this project in particular uh in fact the last project i can think of that has something i've literally never used before is the somatic data glove which i'd actually built like like a year ago or something which use machine learning and i only picked that up because i thought i would i only picked that up because i thought embedded machine learning would be like a way to earn money uh no my threshold is extremely low uh the difference it and it's not a i don't like learning fine i'm a you know i'm i'm a i'm a bad nerd but uh also the time difference and also the variance difference between projects you know how to do and projects you don't is a chasm like i have i could probably estimate how long it'll take me to do a project where i've already done that stuff before down to about i'd say i could estimate that probably plus minus 25 uh but if i don't know what i'm doing that thing could take 10 times as long uh it's impossible it's possible to know uh we have a uh we have a youtube question here uh see uh what this is an excellent one uh clutchoid on youtube asks what about finish projects what the hell do you do with them that is an excellent question uh there is a um there's this cognitive bias called the ikea effect which is the people are irrationally attached to things that they create and i i try as hard like i try as hard as i can to just pitch stuff but uh the fact that i like can use things in future episodes makes it really hard to throw things out so unfortunately like i save way too much stuff left over from past episodes like within arm's reach i've got this rocket that i printed to show transparent prints i've got a 3d printed trebuchet uh i've got the the buff the buff corona from the the 3d printing episode i've got half a nerf blaster that i'm probably never going to play with anymore uh yeah it's really hard the projects are piling up i really need to get rid of them the original plan if you're curious behind the scenes the original plan on my patreon was to give away projects to my patrons but it turns out you can't do that not only does patreon not allow it but running raf but running a lottery like that is illegal i would instead have to make it like an instead have to open it to everyone and i can't like give patrons extra tickets or anything i figured that i didn't want to do that because all it takes is like one person to like a person in alaska to win a big heavy project and i suddenly have to pay like 400 to ship it uh the projects are just piling up i have to figure out something to do with them because we're moving to colorado and i'm gonna have to schlep all this garbage with me oh my nathaniel asks how would you handle projects that seem to be unfinishable due to factors such as constant issues another question when do you cut your losses and get someone else to finish the project and scrap it uh these are both i like that these questions are together because i think the answer is kind of the answer is is together as well i covered this a lot in my in my my video a few weeks ago on how to finish projects but if you just are hitting headwind after headwind you all you just have to keep evaluating is the project worth finishing like assume assuming that i'm going to keep in count assuming i'm going to keep encountering all this crap is the project worth finishing if the project is worth finishing you know whip out your machete and keep hacking your way through the bush but if you've been working on it for two and a half years and you think it's not worth it to put another year into it cut it what do you do when do i know to cut my losses really simple is the project worth finishing uh second question is there another project that would be worth finishing instead and those should dictate uh those should dictate it and if you if you're you gotta be really aggressive about killing projects especially if you've been working on them for a long time the longer you've been working on a project the harder it is to cut it so the more you should mentally weight that math like you should put your thumb on the scale in favor of throwing it out when in doubt chuck it out uh let's oh this is a good one uh jd asks what's your balance of practical projects versus for the memes type projects this is really relevant to me because i'm a content creator i try to only do practical projects there are tons of youtubers who make meme projects and i think a it's done to death and b there is no way i can go toe-to-toe with like styropyro or michael reeves or electroboom or anything so i have to make the projects at least ostensibly useful that said my next project is really useless sort of it's tough it's it's tricky i tried to not do meme projects unless they are going to take like an hour like i rigged up like in my my at my parents place i rigged up the medicine cabinet that when you open it up it says pills here uh but yeah that's like an hour that's about how long i would take to do something dumb like that um that said like the pressure to make stupid meme projects is almost overwhelming uh on account of you know being a youtuber so at least but at least for now i try to make sure that even the goofy projects are still ostensibly useful they're they're they're pragmatic flavored uh that's how i that's how i put it let's uh let's scroll back and chat i feel like i missed a few folks uh i'm an e oh eric olson asks i'm an electrical engineer but while making and testing a pcb i spend 10 times the time on mechanical and ui design how do you stay working on the boring stuff in your specialty this is something that is near and dear to my heart because the thing that i suck at is programming i can program i'm a great programmer in my opinion but i'm not a very fast programmer i'm really slow i make a lot of mistakes i have to backtrack a lot so generally i spend like i spend the first 90 percent of the project building the project and i spend the next 90 percent of the project writing the code uh the problem with the problem for me is that the code is generally the last thing in the project so that means that i have to so it means that every single pretty much every project i build ends on this endless death march slog of ah of having a code it sucks uh there's no way around it you just have to do it you have to grit your teeth you have to and you just have to do it uh i would recommend if you the the more you hate it the more you should make yourself a game plan you should list out all the things to do cut it down as aggressively as possible and just check things off as you do them just to remind yourself that this hell will end uh and you know you got to focus on getting faster uh i have been trying really hard to improve my programming productivity and a big part of that is trying to do as much in python as possible but uh yeah if you're having a hard time writing uh you're having a hard time like doing your modeling uh maybe you need a new modeling program uh maybe your cad program sucks if you have if ui is uh is holding you back maybe you need to just familiarize yourself with some universal framework like uh like tk inter or uh like some javascript thing uh it's pretty tricky but uh you just have to you just have to do it unfortunately it's part of the it's part of the goal it's part of the uh it's part of the game if i i mean if you if you have the ability to do so try to front load the the crap try to do the stuff you don't want to do first because then you still have that momentum that burst of enthusiasm uh and that might carry you through uh that might carry you through that beginning of uh that that awkward obnoxious beginning stage uh i i i talk about this a little more in depth in my video but it can also help to kind of identify ahead of time what the good parts of the project are and then like you know when you're working on the stuff you hate every once in a while you can say all right i've had with this crap i'm just i love soldering i'm just gonna go solder for a bit i think that's nice zaden asks how do you deal with selecting between different options you can choose for a project analysis paralysis sucks and i generally i generally don't for for projects i usually just come up with an idea on how to do it and then i'll like sanity check it so like i'm not really picking between options i'm really thinking of one thing which is for better for worse sometimes it'll launch me head first into building a project that uh uh that's ill-advised but on the whole uh don't optimize projects just straight up no matter what your definition of optimum is don't optimize projects it's a bad it's a poor use of your time this isn't a job you're being paid for you're not handing this code off for someone else to work on you might be open sourcing it no one's going to read it don't optimize anything uh as soon as you come up if you have a bunch of solutions just rank them by how quickly you can finish them and pick the fastest if you're having troubles picking between two of them toss a coin uh it's it's not it's not worth trying to uh it's not worth doing it like analyzing paralysizing yourself over them if you're really having a hard time just do a little investigative journalism into each one right like look into you know like if you're trying to pick between three libraries right try just you know whack together a hello world in each of them uh maybe one of them will turn out to be easier than the others if you're trying to pick between different dev boards right you just look at how look at the tool chains for them uh see like oh teens we know is really easy to install but like this raspberry pi pico is kind of kind of weird uh that can help guide it too generally when you're building a project you want to move as fast as possible with as little variance as possible the highest chance of succeeding the least chance of unexpected complications and uh that usually guides most of the selection choices let's see what's going on here oh zeke zeke asks i've put together a stem club at my school and we all want to learn more about electronics and programming we're having trouble finding a project to take on and more importantly finish any advice and this follows from this chat keeps auto scrolling down and i can't read it blakely classic asking what's a good first project i don't think they're i mean a mechanical keyboard was was one of the ones i recommended but uh on the whole a good first project first off has a low chance of spiraling out of control there isn't complex the number one thing you want to avoid for your first project is complexity you want the fewest moving pieces possible because when you're building hardware everything is the enemy if you are building a if you want a robot to be your first project right and your robot keeps falling over right that could be your code could be messed up uh your motors could be too weak your pid algorithm could be tuned poorly your robot's center of gravity could be too far forward it might be particularly humid that day and it's affecting one of your sensors you have to pick projects that have as little to them as possible uh so things like uh like back in the day a bit like a tv be gone that was a that was a fun little soldering project mechanical keyboards i think are a great first project there's just a lot of soldering most 3d printable projects like anything that's purely 3d printed is going to be pretty straightforward and easy uh make trying to make a game would be fun uh that's a lot of software um you just want to avoid things especially that involve a lot of math that involve a lot of complexity and that involve a lot of tuning so if you're thinking about making a 3d printer from back in the day this was 3d printers and drones when i first got into this everyone and their dog wanted to build a 3d printer and a drone and they were they were teaching themselves electronics so they could build 3d printers and drones and i've i started a hacker space back then and of the few dozen people i saw not a single one came remotely close to ever having a 3d printer or a drone uh and the thing that got them was the complexity of the projects and that you have to tune it afterwards uh you you want when you when you solder that last joint you upload that final cut of the firmware you seal that that shell together you want the project to be over you don't want to be uh you don't want to then have to like tune pid algorithms and gyro compensation and crap for the next 300 hours sucks let's let's let's let's check let's check what's going on on the youtube uh jd kemsley asks how often do you take on projects where a successful outcome might not even be possible never absolutely never if i don't believe i can finish it there's no reason to start it that said uh the second part of the question is to determine the plausibility of a technique i will readily i do a ton of research i go looking for trouble very often uh i uh i do a ton of research and if i if i think a park could be promised if i think like if basically if i go online and it passes a sanity check like i think i can program with it i think i can put it into a circuit it seems like something useful i'll just buy one and then just quickly whack together a test circuit just get an idea of how it behaves how it reacts to various circumstances uh any gotchas or gimmicks uh past that point like past the point i know whether it's whether it's possible or not like for instance when i got started doing somatic right before all right i built the glove first but that was that was because i needed a project to wear to uh the hackaday super con uh but i before i got too serious about the project i downloaded tensorflow and i just tried gathering some data and whacking a model together and it turned out to be a lot easier than i expected uh that said if there are any unknowns in your projects you have to test them first ahead of time uh unknowns just demolish projects um let's let's uh let's see uh oh do projects ever really end orion gill asks do projects ever really end or you just say it's done for now projects the both of those are true for i i strongly believe that you should definitively conclude your projects but i also believe that i also believe that the best way to make a sophisticated project is by making a simple project and then building off of it so like i started so using the glove again is the example right i first built this glove right it's just a standalone glove of sensors then i added the machine learning network right i recognized recognized a few gestures and then i recognized uh letters and then i added in a mouse and then i added in scrolling uh so you should have an end in mind and a very definitive end as well and then you can continue to build off of that uh but yeah this this whole idea that oh the project's never truly ending i'm always tinkering with it no end your project put a bow on it stick a pin in it put it online move on life is too short to spend it tinkering with the same radio for the rest of your existence um let's see oh this is a good this is a neat one uh fr asks fr01land asks how do you deal with over engineering projects and bloated designs oh boy i have a very hard time with this uh i tend to get a good i tend to get an idea for a project and i'm just like oh i can add this on i can totally do this i can totally do this i can totally do this that's the wrong mentality though when you're talking about features uh the question isn't can i do this it is is this one am i going like is this worth doing there's there's only really one way to prevent yourself from over engineering uh and that is to have an end point uh you have to have a fixed point in time past which you are going to release whatever it is uh and that has to be has to be hard as well like you you you have to have that that endpoint or you'll just oh let me tinker this let me tinker with this let me tighten this up let me comment this code nope you have to have an endpoint there's only one way to prevent scope creep and that is you have to lock the scope down you have to write out these are the features and i can never add anything else to this list i can only eliminate things those are really the only ways to do it uh and you should too like next time you come up with try try and experiment like next time you come up with a project uh write out all the features write out all the stuff that'll go into it i mean exhaustively right like like ever like every the part where you glue the bit to the the glove right the the the training utility to make the mach everything write it all out cut fifty percent of it and then try to build the project i guarantee you that the project will i guarantee you that you'll build the project you're like try it just just slice 50 of the features off off something and just try to make it uh it'll be a lot easier than you think uh at this point my rule is if i'm even considering cutting it i just cut it uh especially when you're making videos uh if there's a shot you don't like you know you don't even wonder whether it's worth keeping it you just just get rid of it uh you can always cut making something smaller you can always adjust the size of stuff um let's uh quality ask quality says i don't have a problem finishing projects because i'm too scared to start them any suggestions this can be tricky um i mean this is likely there so when when people hear this right the first thing they think is fear of failure which which can be the case a lot of people are afraid of failure uh i found like i used to be uh just remember that um well there's what like there's the uh there's what the you know is what the psychologists say which is like it's always worse in your head than it is in real life so try some exposure therapy just release garbage and see how little people care about it um there's also the uh also the fact that your reputation really can't your projects really won't shift your reputation that much in one way or the other i don't think people will care either way even even personally like even me right now like i know there are some people who like certain like some of my projects but i think people watch the videos for me not the projects just get the stuff out there what i was saying before though is that this isn't always a fear of failure sometimes sometimes this can come from some insecurity about like how about how people will see you uh this is something like i'm not really an engineer i don't have an engineering degree this is something that really really affects me i nev like for a very long time i just never shared anything i built because like i'm not really an engineer i'm not doing any like advanced computer science i'm not doing any crazy circuits i'm really just taking stuff on online and uh really just taking stuff online and mixing it together but like people like that are just it doesn't uh that does it's not the way it's not the way the real world works uh there are judgmental nerds out there but they're outnumbered a thousand they're out number ten thousand to one by people who are ambivalent or positive uh so just jump into your project stop thinking about it come up get the idea write out a plan to make it happen cut cut half of the plan and then just get going uh worst case scenario which is pretty likely at first is the project doesn't come together womp womp uh oh hey we got a super chat uh gabriel stevens uh thank you so much for the canadian pesos donation uh zach i have an issue where i come up with dozens of project ideas when i'm too busy but i become lazy when i have time in other words i have a procrastination complex and a huge to-do list any advice oh this is this this this can be tricky uh oh man this could be tricky i think the first first off coming up with a bunch of project ideas like that's great like if you're the type of person who will be able to remember them uh do so otherwise like mess around like or just you know write them down come back to them later uh i find i found studying was profoundly uncreative i would often come up with ideas just as just as my head tried to like get me doing something remotely interesting uh but if you're talking about the downtime this is tricky motivating yourself for motivating yourself for projects it demands its own episode uh this is something that i don't believe i can answer effectively in a format like this because of how complex it is but short the short answer the short term is the short thing is if you you should not have any trouble motivating yourself to do things you want to do presumably you want to make your projects if you're having trouble motivating yourself to do things you want to do like make projects you're excited about uh you i'd consider like that that could be uh that could be a sign of like burnout mental mental fatigue even even depression i'm not i'm not i'm not saying that a guy who just gave me canadian canadian boxes depressed uh but what i am saying is that what's stopping you from building projects might lie beyond the project itself it might be a it might be something that could help you in that if you attacked it could help you in other other areas of your life it's it is a very tricky question though uh motivating yourself to get going can be hard motivating yourself to keep going can be hard uh i just for me i just think about the end point i think about what i'm working towards i i just think like wouldn't be so cool if i can like just walk down the street and write out like just flap my hand around write an email and then it just appears there in front of me that would be the coolest thing ever i just keep that that in mind i you know now i can i think like uh wouldn't it be rad to like like break into some building and like pull out my cyber deck and like and like hack in and and yeah okay spoiler i'm not really gonna break into a building though i'm gonna get permission but uh motivation motivation to be tricky we have another super chat oh my you guys have to give hackaday the money uh michael michaels uh thank you so much for your donation thanks for the inspiration to finish projects thank you for using it to build projects i mean that's why i do all this i want you to finish more projects let's get back to some hackaday questions uh oh no it's it's shreya it's shreyaura asks any advice about home automation what's a good way to start for it i'm trying to make a system and what you said is very relevant oh no oh no oh no sri aurora oh no home automation is one of those cursed projects it's a it's an endless abyss from which there is no escape you will never get the system good enough it will never work the way you want it to you will spend we you'll spend weeks of your life trying to close the blinds when you turn the tv on all i can say is keep the system as keep the system as tight and small as possible have the fewest number of hubs and make sure you buy things that have first-party compatibility with the hub like if you're gonna do your lights keep it all philips hue if you're gonna do uh you know if you're gonna do smart outlets like keep them all belkin just keep i'm not endorsing these brands in particular but keep it as as as as contained as possible as many things that have first party compatibility uh if you're doing wireless make test beforehand right make sure your wireless signals will actually be able to make it around uh if you're doing internet your entire system will inevitably fail if you're doing x10 make sure that the right circuits in your house are connected but just be just be aware home automation is a nightmare abyss that will consume your life we have another super chat no we don't i just have two oh hey uh damian sixberry thank you very much uh itch for aurora follows up uh what if i do everything with a pie and a bunch of relays all right that's that's fine if you keep it all with one device i think you'll i think you'll you'll be fine it's when you start having like like diff when you start having like lutron products and phillips products and uh like like belkin products and homemade items and alexas and all that crap uh hey alexa play despacito uh which when you have all of that that things really start spiraling out of control uh kri asks zack i keep messing up some of my autocad projects what do you think i should do to focus more on autocad i don't i haven't used autocad in a very long time i'm a few i mostly use fusion and open scad at this point uh if you're struggling too much with your program try a different program plain and simple i used to struggle i used to like struggle non-stop with uh final cut pro and uh eventually i realized like like eventually i realized like with all the time i'm spending messing around with final cut pro i could like just learn something else so i learned premiere and ah so much better just try different try different uh try different uh program see if it works better i personally like fusion uh solidworks if you're used to the autocad workflow solidworks could help out just a bunch of a bunch of ideas uh let's see we have another super chat you guys are excellent john rowley asks uh how do you organize your work area i find there's never enough space to build a workspace that works open scad for the win open scan uh number one recommendation is to buy a really big desk i have work how long is my desk my desk is six feet by three feet uh buy the biggest workbench you can have and get as much stuff as you can off of it like mount your monitor to the wall uh use uh use like hutches and stuff to get your test equipment up up uh move to hand tools and stuff to a pegboard or to like a sideboard and most most importantly clean off the workbench when you're done for the day clean off the bench i know it sucks but trust me it's worth it i didn't clean off the workbench yesterday and i wasted 20 minutes today like hunting around for my mic it sucks uh buy the biggest desk you can organize stuff so it's off the desk uh and uh clean it off as as best as you can uh i also recommend i mean for me personally i recommend having separate areas for computer and uh for computer and for for hacking uh simply because i don't want to have to constantly move my keyboard and mouse around uh it might might work for you i would also recommend if you do a lot of cutting and grinding things that produce like dust don't do it at your workbench uh do it do it over a trap do it like somewhere that's easier to easier to clean up otherwise you'll get you'll get dust all over everything and and life and life sucks uh generic human asks how do you finish a project you've lost interest in well just ask yourself is this worth finishing like considering how much self-control and self-audit you know auto-flagellation it's gonna take to uh to finish this project is it worth doing and if it's not just deep six it honestly if you lost interest in a project that could be your subconscious saying that what drove you before no longer exists so make sure it's make sure it's worth finishing if it's for a client or something uh if it's for a client or something like or your job like that's you just you just have to suck it up unfortunately like just think about the paycheck if your job sucks like figure out your exit plan but if it's if you're doing it for fun your your fun project should be fun uh if you're pro if like you're not enjoying a project that you started doing because you enjoy it anymore you have to reevaluate whether it's worth finishing we got two super chats oh my gosh mark helms says my adhd prevents me from working on a project till it's done it seems to be a 14 to 30 day time or to a t any advice on long term focus i can i don't think this is an 80d thing uh i i i've been i've been preaching this gospel for anyone who'd listen uh at my at the hackerspaces but i believe that as soon as you get as soon as you get a project idea and you take the first step towards making it happen which can be telling someone about it you have lit a 14 day long a two week long fuse if you haven't made substantial progress on that project in two weeks you're likely never gonna finish i think there's a second timer which is which is three months i strongly believe that if you haven't finished a project but it's 90 days after you start it your odds of finishing it are effectively are effectively zero uh i don't think i'm not even sure this is an 80d thing i think it's just the way human brains work uh you need to plan around this you gotta structure your project so you have the highest chance of having something done two weeks after you start and you have to have at least some aspect of it tied off with a bow by the three month mark uh otherwise you are just setting yourself up for trouble on top of that think like if we're talking about a project that's longer than a month then anything could change anything anything crazy could happen uh like if if if if if growing up like if coming of age oh oh my if coming of age uh between you know like 20 2008 to 2020 is taught me anything like you don't make ambitious long-term plans that require with the world to stay stable for a while in order to pull off you're just setting yourself up for trouble break it down to small pieces that you can finish faster and i don't think it's i don't think it's an 80d thing i think it's just the way people operate us humans just can't sustain motivation for very long uh jd kemsley asks uh what's your motivational substance of choice uh i mean if you're talking about prescription drugs like unfortunately that's between me and my uh me and my psychiatrist i i don't it's gotta be something that you uh you talk to a trained medical professional about do i like drinking on the job uh it's kind of funny before my policy was never drink on the job uh but now my projects are really for myself their youtube projects so um i may hit the balmer peak from time to time uh damien sixberry richard de bellevue thank you very much uh to for the super chats uh damian asks can you make tutorials at least now i haven't figured out a way to make them fun to watch for people who aren't interested in making the thing so maybe in the future but at least for now they're just not fun richard bellevue asks if you're moving to the denver area start a lab there are there are already like five aggro spaces in the area i'm really impressed i'm gonna join one of those before i go through the hell of making my own again oh my gosh uh let's uh jade paradox asks what if you have to save up money for the project for several weeks or months before you can get started this is an excellent question uh that level i wish more people showed that level of responsibility there's no problem i don't think there's any problem with that honestly like if you save up a bunch of money for a project and then you lose interest in the project before you have a chance to start on it that's great you now have a pile of money like the money the money isn't uh the money isn't earmarked for one project the money can be spent on anything that said i would recommend saving up for the entire project before you buy parts for any of it that way if that way if something happens uh you have the highest chance of being able to use what you have but yes saving up for the project uh before you start it is absolutely the way to go you do not want to be in a position you do not want to expose yourself to the possibility that you like something happens in your life and you now can't afford to finish your project you will feel like a total jerk wad uh let's yeah i don't know this this keeps the scroll keeps snapping down to the bottom uh oh uh aidenpro aidenprocopio aidenprocopio asks can we see what the opticon looks like from the inside i can't easily disassemble it right now but i do have uh a second one a second shell that i reprinted and uh yeah there's not not a lot going on on the inside you can see it's got these little so these little holes here uh that uses to actually melt the optics uh and it's got the two halves that kind of like fit together in the sawtooth pattern this one is resin printed it's much higher quality than this but i just haven't had time to haven't had time to mess to mess around and gut it and re rebuild it uh the truth be sold asks what's a good starter project for learning pcb design it's a tricky one honestly your first circuit board design is going to be is going to be terrible because there are just so many moving pieces to it and i guarantee you're going to mess some up whatever you do first uh don't make it too fancy uh get used to the process and then then start getting clever build like something small like a macro pad or like a calculator you know or hook up a bunch of a sensor board or like a like a large smart watch or something uh but whatever it is uh don't try to get too ambitious making it small uh and whatever you do don't make something so small that you can't easily probe it and test it uh if you make your project too dense and tightly packed and you don't add test points you're not gonna be able to you're not gonna be able to debug it uh i'd pick something straightforward pick something straightforward uh especially a lot of surface mount especially a lot of surface mount and through hole components so you can get used to both um i like a macro pad oh we have we have some super chats um let's see i need to scroll to them uh mike mikhail groan thank you very much a huge thanks signing off it's been good having you sam sam asks how do you feel about implantable computers and microchips i am not a cutting edge dude i don't i i don't start using something until it's really useful and mature and implantables aren't there yet i don't see a compelling reason to stab something into my skin and even if i did i don't want to get version one of it i don't think i don't think cybernet i don't think implanted cybernetics are uh well i don't think they're gonna exist in my lifetime there you go hot take uh inna asks uh you seem like a man that sees opportunities everywhere how can you prevent these new opportunities from distracting you from current projects it's really simple you just don't let them distract you from current projects you just start your project and you igno like i i try to keep two projects going so my mentality so my mentality is like i have two projects the gates are closed they're all like if i come up with an idea i have to scrap not set aside tear apart and return the pieces to their to their places scrap a project to make room for it uh and if you're if you have that mentality uh it shouldn't be a trap you fall into just you remember you are the one who decided if you're getting if you're allowing new opportunities to distract you you're the one who allowed that to happen so just don't finish finish stuff before you start something else get and get in that mentality where you where you're doing that if as you get used to working like that you uh you'll also get used to um you get used to thinking in this way that like you you'll really start to internalize that a pr way of saying this you'll really start internalizing that a project is a commitment that locks doors so you'll think twice before jumping into a project because something better might come along and you don't want and like you don't want to have to uh you don't want to have to scrap this one this is this is tricky uh oh this is a this is a neat one austinlambor82 asks how do you balance learning skills with projects i don't straight up i learn on every pretty much everything technical i know i learn on the job while working on a project uh in in retrospect uh you know like in retrospect i'm glad i take those projects because they uh take those projects because i learned the skills but it's a massive uh drain on actually finishing the project i don't think there's really any good way around it uh you you have to know how you learn if you're the type of person who learns best if you're the type of person who learns best by um by like following tutorials and taking lessons uh you know like learn learn some new skills make a project with them learn some more skills make a project with them if you're someone like me who's pathologically incapable of learning anything and sitting down listening to a lecture and following along with the tutorial unfortunately the only thing you can do is just bash your head into it in projects i would say that uh the balance between learning new skills and building projects in my opinion should be massively skewed towards finishing projects uh i really only try to only learn skills as a last resort uh yeah i try to only learn skills as a last resort and when i have an honest belief that if i don't know this the world will pass me by uh that's what that's part of why i got into building uh as part of why i got into the machine learning thing because i thought that like like all the like all the jobs are going to need machine learning and i don't want to like you know be outclassed by by some whip or snapper uh but yeah you you know how you learn best uh but just try to it's really easy to become a lifelong student and a lifelong student is just a fancy way of seeing someone who doesn't do anything uh do stuff um i have uh let's see oh we've got a whole lot of uh a whole lot of questions from from the the youtube uh rayer coley asks how do you convince your girlfriend to let you have the time to work on your projects brooke how do i convince you i mean go away my projects one of the first one of the first things like i did with her was show her my 3d printer uh this is this question is tricky um this question is tricky because it's talking about two at least two very different things uh one of them could be that you are spending you which is one of them could be that your your loved one feels like you're spending too much time and money on projects and not enough on them and in that case you have to like do some introspection and think like is this real is she being too she or he you said girlfriend but i'm not like this applies to everyone are they just being too demanding and too controlling or am i honestly neglecting them uh and that requires you to think that requires you to think through like what is the appropriate amount of time for for me to spend with with my girlfriend on a daily weekly monthly basis uh the or or this could be simply that they or or this could be the sign of a pro this could be the sign of a sketchy relationship uh possessiveness and uh like possessiveness is one of the biggest red flags but i want to be very clear it's more likely it's the first one someone who asks this uh is more likely concerned that you're spending time just concerned that they're that they will be or are neglected or here's if you said wife i would have approached this differently because if the person in your house who manages the budget is telling you uh not to build projects don't build projects don't go broke building projects if it's fiscally irresponsible pay attention to that but you have to but like you have to be careful in this dynamic you have to do some real introspection and think what's the amount of time i want to spend in the relationship and what's the amount of time i should spend in the projects ideally someone that you spend ideally someone who you can spend the rest of your life with supports what you do for fun and expects you to support them and what they do for fun so uh it's a very true it's a very delicate question but i'm glad it's one that you're asking that's what you're thinking about let's see let's answer another youtube question uh let's see i feel like i've been answering the same question a number of times uh jeff crowe asked as a newbie jumping into a hard project do you start something big and small and how soon do you find yourself saying this is way over my head electronics especially but making in general is diabolically complicated every everything has just this brutal learning curve where you need to gain a ton of skills just to put your chips on the game board if you're getting started there are no easy projects everything is hard uh project you it feels like every project you jump into is hard because every project you jump into is hard it's just the nature of the game uh as you get more experience and as as you get more experience as you learn more skills as you get more familiar with like just how the just how the project life cycle works you'll get better at evaluating uh time sinks from like quick quick jobs but when you're just getting started uh they're all gonna be difficult even simple projects will require you to learn new skills and remember you can't you don't have the skills to evaluate what skills you have so uh they're all hard projects dive in get your ass kicked uh if you're the type of person who can learn by studying or being taught do that instead uh if you're the person if you're a person like me who can't just fall off the tree of knowledge and smash your face into every branch in the way down let's let's turn back to hackaday.io uh oh this is what i'm surprised no one's recommended so this is one of them i'm surprised no one has uh anyone's asked yet snell asks advice on making videos from your projects this is a great question at some point i have to do a video on how to make videos about projects but if you can i would strongly recommend making a video about your project instead of taking pictures or making a write-up a lot of people say you have to document your projects and that what they're they're thinking about writing buddy it's not 2008 anymore nobody reads blog posts sorry hackaday this is why i'm do we're doing a stream for a reason uh you have to have a doing a video is a great way of going about it um first first recommendation don't document the project while you're building it you're gonna end up backtracking and making mistakes it's gonna screw things up don't yeah uh second so like instead i would recommend either finish the project and then video building a second copy of the project or disassemble the project and make your video re like rebuilding it from scratch second thing to remember is projects are boring uh yes is a guy who makes projects on his channel for a living uh projects are boring they don't do anything but sit there right so you have to add motion and excitement interest you notice that like in my projects i'm always like doing a time lapse or i'm like pulling focus to like i'm like pulling focus to like cause it to like fade into view right or i am zooming in like there's always something or i'm using it basically there's always something going on to add motion because if i didn't the project would just sit there doing nothing and be boring third recommendation people hate looking at code just completely ignore the code in your video it just you can mention like you can spend a few seconds just saying i use this but on the whole uh people just do not like seeing code uh remember that the purpose of the video is to enter you have to know if the purpose of the video is to entertain or inform and you have to go mega hard on the one you pick if it is for entertainment uh don't think too hard about getting all the information across just focus on what what what makes this fun to watch what do people want to see what are they curious about uh imag like when you're making a video to entertain imagine that you hand the project to someone right or you let them explore your workshop alone what are they going to pick up what are they going to look closely at what are they going to ask questions about what are they going to snoop around in what are they going to marvel at and try over and over again those are the things you have to make it in if you're making it to inform you then have to decide am i making reference material or am i making instructional material if it's reference material your video has to be designed to be watched over and over again and paused and resumed you have to add big ass breaks tons of annotations uh be very clear zoom into things as you do them you can't have anything ambiguous in reference material if it's informational i would just i'll just not do it honestly informational stuff i don't know how to make it enjoyable or informational enough uh the more you try to teach things the more the comments and the response will be you got this wrong uh but uh if you're doing instructional videos i don't think a project is the right way to do it i think showing a very focused example of it is the way to do it uh but that's personal personal preference you notice that i personally do very little in the way of instructional or reference content uh pretty much everything i make is uh is to entertain first and foremost because just really for every person who sincerely attempts to make the project they're gonna be like 50 000 more who just want to see a cool video uh quality the cactus asks what's on your back is that a sword oh this is this is my nerf tactical knife yes you can't put a sword on your back but you can totally put a flexible nerf knife on your back uh let's see what's uh what's uh another good one from from the from the hacker day uh tom nerdy uh chips in as someone who has to take screenshots of these videos to write about them online having it just sit still for a few seconds is nice that's what taking pictures and making video are two separate activities that cannot be combined you do not put static shots in your video and you do not pull frames from a video to get static shots uh it just does not work that's what we that's that's what brooke and i do like we put the thing on the table we like pull focus on it we get some shots moving around we get some shots manipulating it to show off like the shiny bits right and then we switch over to uh then we pull the lens off we only have one lens between our two cameras we pull the lens off the movie camera and we put it on the photography camera and we take a few shots of it uh unfortunately it's the it's just the nature of the game uh coder guy 6000 asks a rather interesting question doesn't have much to do with finishing projects but how do you not short your laptop with an arduino uh i use a i use a an isolated protected industrial power industrial usb hub uh which basically isolates the power for each of the usb uh each of the usb ports and also isolates the data lines and if you do a lot of hacking they're very expensive i think i paid like 160 bucks or something from for mine for an 8-port usb hub but if you do a lot of hacking you'll see it'll it'll save you far more than that maintenance fees it's a great device uh i would totally totally recommend it uh coder guy says oh he killed his macbook oh no uh yeah it really sucks to be you because uh ma max actually have some of the best power uh they have some of the best usb port protection around so you just steve jobs just cursed you from beyond the grave let's uh let's turn our attention back to the back to the youtube uh let's see quinn foster uh says i just spent 200 in parts for a project that i shouldn't have started should i try to finish the loose ends first you got to ask yourself is this project worth finishing uh you seem to have answered your own question in that no uh you shouldn't have started it so in that case you got your answer right there put the parts in your wherever you store parts and just move on with your life unfortunately you're 200 bucks poorer maybe you didn't get anything from it at least you're not at least you're not 200 bucks poorer and also have 500 fewer hours in your lifetime uh yeah let's see oh we got some we got some interesting ones oh uh oh these are not i'm getting getting i'm getting bamboozled here which one do i take brooke stop sending me so many questions pick the good ones and stop asking me questions stop asking me variants of of uh stop asking me variance of um how do i like how do i x multiple projects i feel like we've answered that um 8bit on our discord asks uh my cousin wants to learn electronics but i'm struggling to find a starter project that won't get dull what early projects did you find engaging and keep you motivated unfortunately i'm not the i'm not the one to ask it sounds like you're sounds like your cousin's the one to ask the thing that got me to push forward and just suck it up and keep doing whatever it takes to build electronics was heads up displays i just wanted to be a cyborg so bad that uh i just want to be a cyborg so bad that i uh would do whatever it took to become one uh so i just smashed my head again i learned arduino i learned 3d printing i learned like hand fabrication i learned about modding electronics i learned circuits i learned all this stuff because that's just what it took to build a heads-up display so you gotta find out like what's that thing that consumes him so or her i said you said nephew what consumes him so much niece cousin all right what makes them so fired up they'll fight through anything to make it happen and discovering that is part of the process without something to without something to motivate them and that's a very personal thing it's gonna be very difficult to keep going uh but at the end of the day this is something that they have to just this is something that that they are leading on if there isn't anything if there isn't any project that fires them up to make stuff maybe this isn't the hobby for them i know them's the brakes uh let's see uh fallen legend asks where do you get money for your projects is it a hobby mixed with a job or is is it your job and if so how do you go until that moment you can make what you want uh well right now it's my job and right now it's even so it's funny like i've actually been on all on three different positions in this right now my job is to build my own projects so i get the money from sponsors or from my glorious patrons uh thank you so much guys you your rule uh that funds the projects uh to put on the channel but before that uh i you know i was did electronics consulting i did prototype development consulting and i was a professional prototyper and you know i used my my i used my uh i used my fun funds to pay for my projects before that uh i just was paying for like when i was like in fresh out of college like i just had a stash of money that i'd saved up from internships and stuff and that was the project fund and now that i think about it i'm very lucky that i started getting clients before i fully depleted that fund because i would have been a sad zack i would have been a sad zack indeed rayford asks a neat question did you build your workshop or workbench one tool at a time or did you go through an acquisition stage it's both uh i never buy tools i i i actually really i actually really don't like buying anything so i go so i go through waves where i just like i go through waves where one tool starts dying another tool starts dying i outgrow another tool i grow another tool and i'm complaining to someone like oh my gosh all my my life is falling apart and they say well that's because you're using amateur stuff i'm like oh crap i i do i really have to then i get sticker shock and even more stuff breaks while i'm while i'm waffling on it and then i'm like all right fine enough is enough i need to actually like buy a proper oscilloscope so i might as well also get a bench supply and i also need a decent soldering iron and uh well i i've never had a fun i've never even owned a function generator i think i need one of those too and i need a logic analyzer and then i then i replace a bunch of stuff at once uh so it's kind of both it tends to be all at once but that's only because i uh it's only because i'm so averse to buying things that i have to just it has to reach a boiling point before i'm ready to start shelling out bucks so if you if you guys have watched my videos you've noticed the quality jumped massively in the last two videos well there you go that's that's the behind the scenes i bought a ton of photography gear uh michael morillo asks how did you manage your time specifically when you had a full-time engineering job i find it hard to work on projects when i'm mentally tired from work at the end of the day or week the morning is a good time oh not for me uh not for me uh how do you manage your it's this is difficult uh you will have to see i personally was a consultant so i could just straight up decide not to work on monday and spend that time building a smart watch instead uh if you don't have this luxury if you don't have this luxury you're either gonna i mean they're really only three ways about it right like you can try to negotiate to rearrange your schedule you're gonna have to be a weekend warrior or you're just gonna have to half-ass it you gotta stop taking your job so seriously so you can open up more more mental bandwidth uh dan has reminded me that we're pretty far over an hour now fine with letting it go but if you need to tap out let me know i'm still fine to go i budgeted two hours for this uh but i don't know what the what the hackaday folks are into uh what do you think what do you think ladies gentlemen in cyborg should we keep going or should we uh should we should we tie it off here and uh oh and i have uh excellent um saying it keep going all right i have excellent latency so i know you guys are actually thinking that okay let's let's keep rolling ryan asks ryan gill on the tubes of you asks what are your thoughts on contests on hacks on hackaday and hackster i love them i love these things they are excellent motivation for get for finishing projects many of my earliest projects that i actually finished were done for contests on hackster didn't exist back then but on hackaday they are an excellent way to like focus yourself on a very specific project and finish it on a very particular deadline i love them i did i entered tons of contests i used to have an entire wardrobe of those like those barf green uh inventables or instructable shirts with the little yellow robot on them uh uh i haven't won anything on hackster i hackster's i don't understand how hackster judges their projects but very anyways don't go in expecting to win right don't don't don't allow losing to demotivate you because they're just so many people entering these things like just the odds are against you but they're a great way to focus that said back in the day there used to be a lot of hackathons and i hackathons are terrible they're bad for your health like staying up for two consecutive nights bashing your head against something that you've never seen before with with the the with like you know the reward of having to pitch it i i don't think they were productive i don't think going ah going to hackathons the only thing they ever gave me was like free food and booze and there was that one time at ces where i swindled someone out of where i swindled my way into ces itself but that's a story for another day uh do i have an rfid implant i do not have any implants i ain't sticking nothing into this bod uh it's just not it's not useful enough to uh it's not useful enough to justify the the risk and the pain aoe uh let's see uh oliver gaskell 100 says should i get a 3d printer even a cheap one would be a big investment since i'm only 16 but i feel like it'll help me do more projects 3d printer is like it's the hammer that makes everything look like a nail the three a 3d printer is just so universally applicable that you will just you will use a 3d printer so often that you will just forget about 3d printing all together and you'll just like you'll start you'll just like take it for granted like this like at this point i don't even think about like oh i get to use 3d printing in this project i'm like oh i need to replace this bezel that i broke let's 3d print one oh i'm going to need a we need a knob for this i'll print that thing uh yeah absolutely uh since you're young you probably have a little time on your hands uh you you can you can get a fairly inexpensive one you can get the uh like the ender 3 or the cr-10 which are very very like like awkwardly cheap printers uh that uh that you are only really i can only really recommend them because oh because they improve from when you mod them so yes for a few hundred bucks for an amount that you could conceivably whine at your parents for for a birthday present you could get a 3d printer and it'll change your friggin life absolutely uh let's see adrien procopio asks do you have any budget 3d printer recommendations uh i don't i don't want to sound like i'm endorsing any of them because in general i don't recommend buying a cheap printer but while researching a future video i found a tremendous number of upgrades and information about upgrades for the ender 3 in particular so yeah at one point it would have been the anet a8 but it seems like the ender has kind of usurped that there are just a ton of mod parts a ton of improvements tons of guides uh i would i would i would recommend uh yeah i'd i'd i'd again like i've never owned uh the ender so i'm only going off secondhand knowledge but it seems like a good one although i would recommend get a pei uh magnetic pei bed because screw screw glue and air spray that's that's ancient history that's that's that's all that's that's yes that's yesterday's news let's see what else is going on on the old hack the old hackaday how do i get this to stop scrolling automatically um let's see uh dead air oh no dead air yes can uh dan brings up the constraints uh are forced onto you by a contest absolutely absolutely um dj asks have you ever thought about doing some projects for people with disabilities very uncomfortable with i'm very uncomfortable with doing stuff like this i don't build any of my projects intending for anyone to actually use them and i i i just the idea of like the prospect of making a project and saying oh this is going to help people who is going to help people with parkinson's uh like like paint pictures the idea of seeing something like that and getting all those views getting all those sympathy views and whatnot and then you know if someone with parkinson's actually wants to use it be like well i didn't really document this since the code's kind of untested it doesn't work very well that's just that's just kind of gross so that's part that's mo that's why i've avoided doing uh projects for accessibility and for medical conditions and whatnot because i just i don't feel like i do it well enough to actually help them in the long term and it feels like it's just exploitative uh exploitative that said uh i'm sure that one of the wearable projects i put up will eventually be used for stuff like that because like wearables rule and there aren't a lot of starting points for uh for wearables uh let's let's do uh let's get let's get our butts on a uh on a youtube uh dennis peterson asks once i figure out how to finish a project i lose interest in actually finishing it how do i get over this to finish them well from the sound of it see this is this is tricky because i'm not not really sure the dynamics going on but from the sound of it it could be that the puzzle of figuring out how to the puzzle of figuring out how to put the pieces together is what's motivating and that's really interesting i've never heard of anyone who who's motivated primarily by that but but that's that's that's great i would say in that case pick harder projects pic or pick projects where you have to build a bunch of stuff to reach the challenging part basically i'm waffling around this make projects that have really complicated software because then you're forced to build all the hardware before you can do the hard stuff and then you basically have this really big really complex pr uh problem to solve this this like like like a a bunch of needles you have to thread i would pick stuff with trickier software just stuff that will keep you uh will keep your gears chugging the entire way through uh but at the end of the day like there always has to be some amount of self-discipline uh you're never gonna at some point you are gonna have to just crack the whip and get yourself to sit down at your desk and and get stuff done them them's the breaks i know uh jonathan hunt asks uh what made you get into youtube uh i want to say it was the pandemic but it wasn't basically i had a really long running contract uh that kept me busy for like five years it ate up almost ate up most of my time for like five years and that ended around december and uh i was looking for new clients and i just there were there just weren't too many meetups there there weren't as many meetups so like i decided to start doing i so i started thinking of doing youtube videos uh to find more clients then pandemic no more meetups and i'm like oh crap i guess we have to do this plan so i ran the numbers and i realized that if i went full time on it i had a pretty decent chance of either getting enough clients to make it work or making it work without the clients and my hunch turned out to be correct the math played out and here i am talking to people for canadian pesos and super chat uh see the green hoodie asks how old am i gentleman never asks a lady never tells i'm just kidding i'm i just turned 32. am i i'm 32 right yeah i'm 32. i'm old as hell according to silicon valley i've been dead since like 2008. uh derek acosta says after using your eyewear for years have you noticed your vision change in each eye i'm not i generally don't wear the computer unless there's like a need for it so really when i'm off camera uh i'm rarely wearing the computer but that said it shouldn't cause your vision to change very much uh your eye is used to prioritizing your eye is used to prioritizing uh what it's which point of reference it's using to focus and honestly if you wear a wearable computer for a long period of time you'll the only negative effect will be that uh things will things will seem really weird and your depth perception could be messed up if you remove it because your brain just edits it out uh i've actually completely forgotten i was even wearing this thing uh because i let it fall asleep and i don't i can't even see the timer anymore do a backflip i can't my apartment's too small yeah the apartment's too small for for back for uh for backflips uh let's see uh adrian procopio says i think i should go to class now i think you probably should too uh oh man elweck asks what's your opinion on the raspberry pi pico as a big teensy fan in the abstract like in the abstract i don't think it's great i i which is oh man it's hard to say in the abstract i mean for four dollars it's a lot of it's you get a lot of stuff for it uh the teensy just grinds it to dust uh vis-a-vis uh i o options and uh and and sheer power like the tnc is just crazy tnc is twice as more twice as powerful as both of the cores and the pico working together uh it has a bazillion analog pins and tons of interfaces the pico only has three analog pins and yeah interfaces like you have to get into the pio stuff uh on top of that the raspberry pi the raspberry pi pico yeah like it it gives you an it's you either have to drag and drop uh software you either have to like drag and drop or use a command line to load to like copy firmware in in the file system or use an swd programmer which i think are both like those are extreme ends i guess if i have to sum it up it's that i don't know when the hell i'm ever going to have time to actually try to use one of these picots in a project i bought three of them as soon as they were announced and i don't think i'm ever gonna have a project i don't think i'm ever gonna like be able to actually like mess around with them that's part of the fun uh olivier oliver gaskell asks uh given the choice would you use circuit python or arduino c depends what i'm building i know it's such a cop-out right if what i'm building has to be really high performance and have really tight timings and good latency circuit python's unworkable uh or if i'm using a microcontroller that can't support circuit python or a topography that can't such as like i don't want the ability for someone to quickly edit my code by messing with a thing on a file system uh c is the way to go i've never actually used circuit python uh i've just never had a usually when it's usually when i it's time to bust out the python like i'm working on a full-on like computer uh generally i need low power consumption and uh fast responsiveness for my side projects or uh high compatibility with libraries uh arduino's got the libraries them's the breaks let's go let's get back to finishing a few projects uh let's get back to to to doing some projects uh let's see uh oh no that's that's not a good one [Music] nuka cola break asks you mentioned that you were in engineering school and you left what was that decision like that see this this is relevant to me finishing projects because well when i left i mean i didn't i didn't so much leave a switch from engineering to business but it felt terrible like i felt like a total failure like you know i i felt like a failure because i was right like i felt like you know if i had just worked harder if i had just if i just knuckled down if i had just sucked it up and did what everyone else did when everyone else did like i i maybe i wouldn't be here right now and like it really felt bad i felt terrible and i beat myself up over it but late but only a few years but only a year or two later i started building projects on my own and i was like wow i said i i spent like an entire week studying like the parallel plate equations and the capacitor equations and i didn't understand what the hell was going on and i figured out what the hell this thing is for like in 15 minutes uh i just like and some some people can't be taught you can only learn for some folks like one project like one project is worth an infinite amount of uh of lectures and uh that turned out to be me i wish there was someone in my life i wish there was someone in my life who could have told me that uh the people like you know the folks in my life we were saying something like we're mostly saying something like well you know no one said it would be easy you just have to knuckle down and fight through it there was anyone saying like maybe you should spend more time in the engineering lab which i thought was kind of i don't know it's kind of an odd realization uh oh my gosh noah combs asked if i have any can bus experience but he said any cannabis experience uh i played with it briefly in hacking a car but car hacking problem car wrecking projects are pain in the butt um let's see for can you hunt me down a a a pro like a how to finish your projects question or two very expensive project uh okay i'm sorry i can't credit you uh the question scrolled off the screen but uh what's my take on very expensive projects well projects aren't cheap uh all the projects that i've put on my channel so far uh the thunder finger was the thunder finger was cheap that one probably cost about 150 give or take but uh it's not uncommon for me to spend three to five hundred dollars on a project projects are expensive uh you have to be confident that you have the money to to to pay for them uh i get the content that everyone the video that everyone wants me to make is like how to build an electronics lab for two for 300 or how to build a project like top 10 projects you can build for 20 dollars and i it's it's not the right mentality this isn't a cheap hobby i know it's life sucks wear a hat this is an expensive hobby uh if you are tr like if you're trying to cut costs that aggressively you you're gonna be spending so much of your time working around the limitations of inexpensive stuff so much time sourcing things so much time paralyzed in fear because if you burn out your component that's more money out of your pocket just you got you got a budget you got a budget enough and on top of that you have to have slush available because projects will cost more like you'll need extra parts projects will cost more uh yeah personally if i had fewer if i wouldn't start building a project until i had about 500 bucks to spend on it not saying that the project will cost 500 bucks but that's pretty much the upper limit of what a project uh what a project could cost as for tools like i would recommend upgrading your tools as soon as you can especially if you think you're going to stick with this hobby for a while unfortunately this is a time-consuming and expensive hobby and uh there is no secret there is no like secret path like it's an expensive hobby and it's not because we're idiots we're not morons who are overpaying for things because we haven't discovered the magic of alibaba no this is an expensive hobby and things are expensive because you're paying for things that save you time uh that's uh that's where i go michael anderson asks a great question have you ever had to change hardware decisions mid project like the board you wanted to use just wouldn't work no matter what so you have to switch to something else oh yeah this is a common this happens pretty often uh for the where for like the data glove i ran through three different imu modules uh this is the seventh head this is the seventh version of the heads up display like the seventh version of the hardware uh this happens all the time uh i oh my gosh for some for somatic oh this is a great one uh for the uh for the data glove i built the entire project i shoved it all together closed it up wasn't working and it just straight up wasn't working and uh i realized that it was because um basically there was a difference i'm not gonna go into specifics because i don't have the exact thing in front of me but basically uh the the tnt 3.2 did not allow you to assign certain functions to certain pins but the teensy 4.0 did so i had to rip the teensy 3.2 out of the project i had to solder in the tnt 4.0 and i had to redo half the wiring because i cut it perfectly to length that's uh that's the that's the nature of the nature of the game don't never be afraid to never be afraid to discard work you've already done uh if backtracking can save you time absolutely do it remember remember the the ikea effect an escalating commitment the you if you're trying to decide whether to backtrack and rip out a part of a project make mentally like mentally make yourself more willing to do that increase the weight of it because you're you're biased against going back so like if you're like 80 sure if you're like i don't know if you're like 60 sure that backtracking is the right decision round it up to round it up to 100 uh you you and just just don't don't don't worry too much about it like there's no there's no shame in wasting and wasting work uh you're just trying as long as you finish the project long as the project remains worth finishing uh absolutely uh sammy asks uh hey zach i'm working on a huge project should i use a teensy or an stm32 i mean whichever one everyone has the the features you're looking for whichever one you feel more more comfortable working with uh i mean if you're if you're starting from if you're starting from whole cloth i believe a teensy will be will be faster to get going with because i think that you have less tool chain to set up but an stm32 will be way cheaper and like it's a it's a giant product line like there are there are ones with all kinds of peripherals and ios so it it comes down to what what the needs your project are uh i'm not i'm i mean i know that teensy has i know tc 3.2 and 4 have native can bus uh they have a can bus hardware peripheral i don't know any i don't i'm sure there's an stm32 that does it as well uh there's no hard and fast answer you're just pick the one that's more appropriate for your project if you can't decide pick whichever one is easier to set up yeah them stems the brakes uh oliver gaskell set us brings up i backtracked on a pcb and ripped up half my routing ended up being so much cleaner absolutely uh with pcbs especially because with pcbs especially uh the the decisions you make in routing a circuit board depend a lot on the initial decisions that you make and the initial placement of parts and that means that that like just things you could never have seen coming early on just had crazy effects down the line so yeah i find this all the time ripping things up and uh ripping things up and redoing parts uh are there any questions you want us to ask well anything that's getting in the way of you finishing your project uh yeah uh if you're if you're interested if we're interested in the general questions you can check out my discord uh i'm not sure if the link is in the description but really sh it really should be uh but you should check out the the void store lab discord i answer a lot of common stuff on there and uh i also have a lot of other faqs but yeah anything that's blo anything that's blocking you for finishing your projects any insecurities any any worries that are uh that kind of stand in your way there's if there's any pr if there's like that project in back that like you know it's lurking there and you're really embarrassed about it and like you you don't want people to rummage through your stuff because they'll find it and ask what's this and then you'll be like i don't want to talk about that for instance uh yob de haan asks do you plan in pre or sub prototypes before you start in the first v1 product absolutely if i've i if i've never worked with a part before i always always want to to to mess around with it before i uh before i jump in like if i haven't uh if i like for instance if i the uh the for instance uh the thunder finger right like the uh the that project was a currency a current sensor on my finger an led matrix a fet like a an adafruit bluetooth feather and uh a vibrating wristband so the first thing i did was i made sure that i could program for the feather and then i made sure that the feather could talk to the wristband and then i made then i played around with the sensor and then i just like displayed stuff on the led matrix it was only after i knew that each one of those things worked in isolation that i put them together even then i'm still going to backtrack multiple times i redid the enclosure for that i think three times because uh like you just can't think of everything the first time so yes ab yes absolutely uh let's uh yes absolutely i do both i do both proofs of concept and first run prototypes on top of that like i sometimes view the project itself as a prototype i often go back and like take revenge on a project like the uh i'm just like this is the seventh version of the heads-up display but the somatic data glove is the clearest example of this because that's version two of an earlier version that didn't use a glove that was fully 3d printed and it had way too much way too many poor mistakes but yes the second time you do anything it'll it'll it's it's crazy like have you ever like if you've ever played a video game for the second time and you might not necessarily feel like you're that much better after finishing it the first time but the second time you just blitz through everything uh and it feels the same way with a project the second time you do something uh you already know the gotchas you already know the the things to avoid uh you already have stuff that you can work with um it's uh yeah yeah you should thinking in terms of prototypes and revisions is definitely better than like let's build this um well let's richard bellevue has a really practical question i like this one my biggest obstacle in getting projects done is finding time between all the other things i have going on around the house any tips on getting projects done when you have just a bit of time each day i think you're i think your challenge begins at a lower level brooke and i brooke and i were moving to colorado and we deliberately decided to not live in a house we decided to live in an apartment in a managed like a com like a condo type thing specifically because living living in a house just creates so many extra chores that you have to do uh i think the first thing to do is to try to uh open up more time see if like you can divide the chores a different way uh see if you can like for instance if you're cleaning your house right it only it might only cost like 50 bucks once you know once a month to have someone else come in and and clean it for you just look you can look for ways to uh get rid of or minimize tasks maybe you know you're doing something too high of a standard cleaning out the gutters every weekend when you can really do it once uh once once a month another another recommendation is to try to consolidate your free time uh see if you can do like i i i don't know i don't know any specifics but like see if you can finish a whole bunch of like basically see if instead of having one hour a night see if you can see if you can uh get to get two nights with three hours you'll get far more done in that unfortunately past that point this is a time consuming hobby it's it's just the nature of the game uh you'll you'll just have to pick things that are less time consuming uh things like maybe 3d printing stuff you can let the printer chooch as you do other things uh programming and things that can be done purely on a computer if you're commuting maybe you can switch to public transit and get stuff done on the way home but uh on the whole like unfortunately this is a time consuming hobby uh even my even my simplest projects i wouldn't budget any less than 20 or 30 hours for them it's just that it's just the nature of the game uh let's see jonathan hunt asks i have trouble finding out what type of projects to do there's such a huge abundance of things that i could do that i end up being paralyzed by all the possibilities how do you navigate around that um this isn't something i personally struggle with as you'll find out in my video at the end of this this this month but this is something i view a lot this is something i this is something i ran into [Music] a lot and just making life choices in general there's a venn diagram uh things you're capable of doing things you enjoy doing things that things that do things for you right so for instance in a job right you want to you want has to be something that you can actually do the job right like you actually be qualified you have to enjoy doing it and you have to it has to pay you well if it has all three go for it so for your projects it could be uh for instance uh a project that you already know like for you know like you you're already good programmers you already know you can program you enjoy this type of programming and this particular project will let you enter a contest or this particular project will be something you use on a daily basis and once you have all three they're all good ideas any like sort them by descending sort them by ascending order of how much time it takes and do the shortest ones first yeah look for look for things we can thread the needle like that uh we've our i'm just going to announce about a 10 minute warning so get them in uh sammy says see if you can find something that your social human side wants to do and figure out how to do with electronics uh other people can be motivating um you might like if you're the type of person who likes being the smartest person in the room you can joining a hacker space or joining for instance a discord for instance the void star lab discord where you can show your projects off can just be a wellspring of endless motivation like there's always someone there ready to tell you how cool you are when you finish something so uh so uh yeah see uh uh aaron asks if you oh no aaron asks have you ever done one day builds with time as the main constraints every project i build from this point every project i've built since starting the youtube channel is supposed to be a one day build uh i rarely actually stick there i really can actually stick with that but they're supposed to be uh it typically um typically end up being a few more days but uh yeah it's it's tricky uh i'm not at the channel is not even close to the stage where i can do like what the hacksmith does and hire like an entire team of engineers to make sure there's fresh content each week so unfortunately every one of my projects has to be done on this bonkers brutal schedule so yeah most of them are uh yeah uh most of them are uh this is a hmm that's a very specific someone asked me how i bypass a light speed brand firewall that's a very specific question sir madame or cyborg uh red leader 36 asks do you software track projects free camp trello excel does project management help you if your project is so big that you would benefit from project management software your project is way too big just carve pieces off of it until you can fit the whole thing in your head uh i will okay if if the project is i will occasionally like write like i'll open up evernote and i'll just write a list of all the tasks to do but that's more of an aid to figure out what to cut uh if you can't keep the whole project in your head your project is far too big uh if if your project is taking so long that you need to manage that you can manage entire days your project's too big uh cut it not saying give up on your dreams i am saying curve your project up into smaller pieces standalone individual projects that are small enough that you can like envision them and see them through to the end joseph kurtz asks again how do i bypass lightspeed systems firewall ask your ask your sysadmin uh michael anderson asks how do you mark the differences in projects for example like how do you version your projects is there a particular metric you use um it's kind of funny uh inter internally uh inter if you look at my computer internally uh i have like for instance like let's say uh data let's say like my smart watch right i have this it's called the smartwatch uh so the version two was called revenge of the smartwatch version three was called revenge of revenge of the smartwatch and eventually i will change those eventually i'll change those to like uh to give them their own name generally in a series i often have working titles for projects like my first rapid like the the rapid strike from my video the meta breaker uh its working title was the hot beef injection so so the second version i was working on they threw out in that episode was called the human booster shot uh naming for internally naming a project is is always fun you can lose a lot of time trying to name a project in general i'll use mark like if i have to uh if i have to i'll use marks so like you'll have mark one mark ii generally uh i'll use subversions like you know 1.1 i generally use sub subversions until [Music] so much has changed that the projects are incompatible uh then i'll then i'll make a new uh then i'll make a new version uh which is kind of an interesting one billy rubin asks how do you take care of your mental health when you're working such a crazy timeline unfortunately there's very little to do um unfortunately there's very little possible um just have to it comes down to sound time management just try to try to orchestrate things so that when i burn out i i can i can i can land it in a place where i don't have to produce a project that week i know it's not very healthy uh a part of it is figuring out when to clock out each day right like figuring out when uh figuring like figuring out that enough is enough uh me forcing myself to do other things other than work like i force i force myself to have dinner with brooke as much as possible i try to have dinner with brooke every single night i try to play at least an hour of games every night um and uh good time management like the only way to prevent the only way to limit the damage is to prevent tasks from piling up so a single day of procrastination mean could mean like a total mental collapse in three weeks uh unfortunately it's the it's the nature of the game and i have no right to and like don't i need to make this very clear i'm not complaining i get paid for this right i get paid by sponsors i get paid by by patrons i get paid by youtube i have i have relinquished my right to complain about this i love this job and people support me for it so i'm not complaining at all it's just the r it's just the nature of the game if this is this isn't something you can deal with unfortunately you gotta pick a different profession uh five minute warning but uh it's it is tricky i think it's important to recognize when i have it's important for me to recognize when i'm hitting the point of diminishing returns and eject like once i'm at that point where if i continue working i'm gonna start burning out i have to i have to i have to move on and if that means cutting the project down or calling a sponsor and moving a video that's the way it's got to work uh i've actually it's this has gone into this has gone really nuts because of the move like yeah brook is handling the logistics of the move but still complicates it still complicates everything there's still a lot of stuff to plan and uh it's put strain on my already bursting schedule so you know it's it's it's tricky it's part of the fun uh projects with red asks on youtube how do you plan the project video while making the project how does that work for you this is a neat this is a neat question there's only a single video there's only a single video where i wrote the video first and then built the project and then designed the project and that was the among us video because the among us video was was more of a it was more sketches like there's almost more sketches than uh than project but generally i'll come up with the idea uh i'll build the project um trying to record anything remotely interesting and uh then i'll write the pr then like generally i have to start writing the video before the project is fully finished which makes some fun things happen like uh saying something isn't physically possible and then clearly showing on video that it is uh but uh yeah i i generally have an idea of the i i started with a rough idea of the video and then i make the project the important thing to remember is in the style i i don't believe that the process of making projects is fun to watch i'm not saying it's not interesting it's just not fun to watch so the actual making stuff part of my maker videos is only like maybe 30 seconds of a 10 minute long video uh so it doesn't actually have a lot of bearing on it it's it's kind of fun though uh the projects i do have to come up with projects that appear that that work well on camera uh i yeah they have to come up with projects that work well on camera and then i can actually finish on time which can be hard uh matthew dean asks and this will have to be uh i think this will have i'll take one more question from uh from uh hackaday.io but matthew asks how do you recommend focusing only on a project instead of social life and other interests aka how should i should i jump all my time into one thing uh there's no good way to answer this question because i think that's like there just isn't enough time for everything you shouldn't throw you know don't throw away your social life right but if you are serious about a time-consuming hobby you're going to have to say no to a lot of social engagements that you would otherwise have gone to so like the best way to split the difference is just to just get improve improve saying no like you like you can you can totally say like you totally you should you should totally feel comfortable telling a friend like uh yeah i'd like to go like i normally i go out for beers but i really like i'm really close to i'm really close to like finishing up this rc car i really want to tie it off and if the answer should be like ah all right that's pretty neat maybe you know it's some like you will have to make sacrifices uh personally i don't get lonely i've only started getting lonely since i've met brooke uh so for me this this i wasn't even aware i was doing this but uh is it healthy no is it necessary probably no uh you do have to you do have to be careful uh social social stuff tends to monopolize your time and so do projects you have to know how much you want to put into each of them uh so they don't spiral out of control uh and let's see the more let's see uh somebody has been spamming how to break into a router if a firewall if this were my chat i would ban them um let's pick out let's pick a juicy one let's pick let's pick it let's pick a tasty one here uh this is the final one uh what's the most dangerous project you've ever done oh oh my i one of my earliest projects i which i actually put on you can see this project it was called the knockbox i put this on uh put this on instructables and this was uh the idea was you'd knock on your desk and it would like turn your lights on and off right and i built this thing in the worst possible like this thing was so like if a screw had been driven in a quarter inch further uh it would have created a short on the mains like if i open this thing up like there was a this there was no uh creepage right that like the lines were so close together that i'm i'm sure an arc formed across solder like i'm sure an arc formed across the traces every time one of these things opened or closed and eventually that would short out uh this thing was this thing was a disaster like i didn't realize it at the time but i was quite literally playing with fire uh unfortunately that is all the questions that i can take if you this this this is still this this this talk can still go on uh if feel free to hang around uh the hack chat i need to hit the road uh but uh folks aren't going anywhere the hack chat forum stays online even between hack chats thank you so much to dan and everyone else at uh hackaday for uh for making this possible if you want to keep rolling uh if you want to keep rolling you can come to my discord we we made partner yes i forgot about this we made partner you can just go to discord.com zac friedman right and like and like you can get in it's great uh you know my patreon you zack friedman uh everything zach friedman instagram twitter it's all zac friedman all the way down uh i have patrons they're great i'm not gonna i'm not gonna thank all of them uh except for i'm not beadacore he deserves it uh and yes uh some of these questions are excellent and they're the types of things that the types of things that frankly i'm not the one not the one to answer uh if you get on our discord and you tag one of the helpers they will be more than help more than uh happy to uh to join in anyways thank you so much to everyone on uh on hackaday thanks to everyone on youtube uh thanks to all of you folks in the future uh it has been great and thanks to brooke of course the lovely lady to the side of the guy in front of the camera yes that's brock uh take it easy y'all see you in the future

Channel: Zack Freedman

Views: 17,291

Keywords: DIY

Id: L_X2DGzPDn0

Length: 120min 24sec (7224 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021