then here you have it: take this "although it's not true" thing as inspiration and make it true.
First you have a usecase, then you try to solve it. If you don't find the usecase, keep on playing with LEDs and buttons. One day you will find your usecase.
I am not really sure where the overall idea for a project actually comes from.
One of my first projects was to create an interval windscreen wiper module that can use the original switch, simply because i wanted one for my oldtimer car. And the melody player comes from that same source. I wanted something to be played when i leave the car lights on.
I have a friend who builds party decorations for a living. He has requests that i try to fill. Particularly related to lighting and LED-strip controlling. Sometimes to improve on what is available commercially, sometimes to invent something that isn't easily found, and even to reduce costs.
I have built a few clocks, again for me mainly. I need an alarmclock that rings even if the mains power drops away.
And then there is solution related to making music, like Midi controllers / filters.
I lack the time to realize the things i come up with.
Instead of writng this post is should be spending time on my new smarter heating-radiator control system, which monitors the exact temperature of the radiator, controls the inlet valve, and drives small ventilators to heat up my living room when i want it warm as quickly and energy efficiently as possible. Of course i want to combine it with a weather station / clock that measures outside and inside temperature and humidity. I have a weather station like that now, but it is getting old and i think i can do a better job.
There is still the old phone that i wanted to turn into a BT-phone that takes care of a whole bunch of communication things, but once the lockdown ended, i had to prioritise other projects.
The best is if i or someone else needs something. I can conceive it, built it. write the code, make it actually work, and then use it.
Motivation?
Simple enquiring mind mainly.
When, aged about 10-years I made my first circuit of Ever Ready battery, a bit of fuse wire and a torch lamp, and it lit up, I was hooked.
There followed crystal sets, motors, model railways, instrumentation, PLCs, then Arduino.
A key part of my professional career has been problem solving, doing the jobs no-one else wanted to do, and making things work.
I have a major failing though.
Finishing the job. Once things are working, the tidying up is where the interest falls off.
I drove colleagues and office cleaners up the wall.
Another driving force has been to make things work better and more reliably.
Heavily involved in plant automation. Introducing PLCs to largely manual operations. Not always popular.
Unfortunately, when I was doing all this, pre-WWW, it was hard work and microcontrollers were off-limits.
Now, I look for projects to use MCUs.
Like replacing the countless things like heating programmers, timers etc., all commercial stuff that fails and can't be repaired.
As I get older, I look at energy efficiency, devices that help me, WiFi switches, lighting control.
Having projects or hobbies, is an important way to keep the mind active and relieve the increasing everyday stress and difficulties.
What better than Arduino.
I can chime with all that.
Clocks fascinate me and I like time (clocks) to be accurate. Have been doing a long term test of a DS3231. Results? Pretty good. Maybe 1-second drift per month. Unlike the Nano R4 RTC losing 70-seconds a day.
Heating control. Yes to that. I hope one day to live in a well insulated house with electric heating - not heat pump - so much easier to control than a wet boiler system.
I have several vintage sewing machines awaiting conversion to MCU control, an old GPO (BT) telephone to convert to a doorbell
If you can't find self-motivation then maybe this hobby isn't your cup of tea.
Have you tried cooking?
I get mine updated through NTP. I have one based on a 60 led WS2812b ring that does an update once an hour and my Nixie alarm-clock does an update twice a day at a few minutes past 2 and a few minutes past 3 to make sure the daylightsavings corrections are always happening. Of course counting through the corrections to make sure the alarm goes off if it has to.
I like to keep my sewing machines analog, though i did replace the LCD on the one digital one i have for an LCD with backlighting.
Would be nice to create an embroidery machine though, using stepper motors, but where to find the time.
These are all old Singer machines.
All they have is 240-V AC motor and a restive divider foot control.
The motors are universal series wound types so run on DC just as well.
My conversion is to operate on 180-V DC and use a Nano to provide PWM through a MOSFET.
This works very well and just needs a 0 to 5-V control voltage.
The machine remains the same mechanically but with better control.
I add a tachometer for speed display and feedback.
With the Nano in place, you can add features like soft start, single stitching, raise and lower needle.
As the wood base has an accessory compartment, it's an ideal place to fit the control electronics without making any alterations to the original.
The Chinese motor upgrade kits with new motor and triac foot control work well too.
The mechanics of these machines make them very long lived.
My favourite is a model 21, aluminium body, 1954, with helical gearing.
Isn't a lot of the pleasure in the building?
I love a good kit, real stress busters.
Beats Gala Bingo or Strictly anything hands down.
For some, sure. If that's the driver, drop the completed model in the trashcan, and start another. I like to work on things that contribute to a "greater whole", and the model RR shines for that. Signaling, block detection, train control, automatic traffic control, all play parts in a synergistic whole.
That's telling you something, but you have to figure out what. Did every project 'fail' at the same step? Then what was it - code, hardware, electronics, finishing up, documenting, or ??? Or did it just take so long that you lost interest? I suspect that, no matter what hobby you take up, you'll struggle with the same 'failure to complete' until you figure this out. We all have weak and strong areas, and figuring that out, and either powering past it, or finding avoidance techniques, is part of progressing.
When I was a kid, even at the youngest of age, I was ALWAYS taking stuff apart. Clocks, engines, electric motors, etc⊠Everything I could get my hands on. Most of the time I was able to put it back together, but did not want to because the fun was getting into it and seeing how it worked. As an adult, I have had to âlearnâ how to see the project through to the end. Not every step of the way is the fun part.
Choose a project which will be simple and useful, say a clock that gets its time from the internet and adjusts itself for DST so you never have to touch it. My house is littered with these with all sorts of different displays. But, really, anything that could be useful. The simplest project which I've built, which is in daily use, is a battery operated thermometer with a 7 segment display. You wave your hand over it and it shows the temperature for 5 seconds. My wife can manage this, even at night, without having to hunt for her spectacles.
Some times, a project can have uninteresting parts to it. For example, I am now working on a weather forecast display and I am in the process of converting a whole stack of weather condition icons to a reduced size. Or, better said, I should be. Instead I am browsing through this forum or aliexpress !
Oh, and anyway, what does it matter if the project has been done before or is, in some way, not unique ?
Yep, i use slightly newer models because of the free-arm to fit over sleeves and trousers, but as analog as can be.
I don't bother about single stich and such, that is what my right hand is working as a break is for.
Still have a couple like the 7134 i bought a few years back of an old lady, but on my previous one the gearing to the hook broke, then the tip of the hook, got a new hook and gearing but it never worked quite as well anymore.
Here is an example of needing to find a solution. I recently just completed a custom gate installation with some high end automatic operators.
At our first meeting, the customer decided he wanted swing gates for sure. For various reasons a slide or cantilevered gate was not an option. In this particular jurisdiction, swing gates SHALL swing to the inside of the property, mainly so fire trucks wonât hang up on them trying to turn into the driveway.
This driveway is on a steep hill, going up hill behind the gate. So the gates would have hit the driveway when opening. At the beginning of the project, the gradework guy, the builder, the customer, and I all met about the gradework. I requested to have the grade work behind the gates graded to a slope of about a quarter inch per foot. (What is that for the metric folks? About 6mm per every 30cm maybe?) Well what I got was more like one to two inches per foot. Way to steep, but everyone ASSURED me the grade work was done. So I told the customer I have to hang the gates high to clear the drive when they are open. He said OK.
Fast forwardâŠHe loves the gates but doesnât like how high they are when closed. There is about a 14â gap under them when closed, but just enough clearance when open.
Here is my long winded pointâŠHe needs a solution to this problem. He rejected all earlier solutions along the way. We met up this morning and I proposed to build a hinged section under the bottom of the gate that matches the gate style. With the help of Arduino and some small linear actuators, along with a few other componenets I can make the hinged section hinge down when the gate is closed to fill the gap, and hinge upward out of the way when the gate is opening so it does not hang on the driveway.
He told me to quote it. So I will see where it goes.
Finding solutionsâŠThat is what inspires a lot of us to build something.
Exactly! I have the same problem with everything. But I can't seem to figure out what it is.
Mostly I don't find any ideas that sounds good enough to build. But occasionally when I do, I get disappointed and leave it in the first 4-5 days.
For example I tried to make this electronic candle/lantern(never took a form and remained on breadboard so I'm not sure). I simply gave a random brightness to an orange led, but lowered the floor for the random range, based on the loudness of a microphone, so that when I blow in it, it looks like it's flickering. Also there was a speaker connected to a 12-bit dac with a white noise generated with, again, a random number but this time the ceiling got higher, it was supposed to be a very basic simulation of the whoosh. But then I figured out it has so many problems like any sound, not just wind, triggers the thing and I probably had to filter it with dsp which I have no idea how to do and also arduino is not capable enough to do it, and also any input audio to the microphone somehow leaked into the speaker too, and just random numbers weren't enough for the realistic effect but i had to do some experimenting with perlin noise, and my microphone module had an AGC(Automatic Gain Control) which interfered with registering the loudness properly, etc. etc. which was too much and I just gave up entirely.
Or once I tried to have a processing sketch change colors, based on a tcs3200 module. So I tried arduino libraries for the module, and none of them were good enough. I tried writing something on my own and I figured out I probably need to buy a colorimeter to calibrate the module. I thought maybe I can do a good enough job by creating pure colors on my screen and measure it with the module and make some sort of curve and calibrate the module that way but again it was too much work so left that too.
Those benchmarks sound very useful for people who are tying to choose between different modules. Maybe you should write blogs or make videos comparing them.
@jdolm have you done any just basic learning type projects? Or did you start on full blast?
I have a CNC plasma torch in the shop. It has a 4âx4â table. Regarding this table, there are two reasons I got into Arduino.
#1 It has a parallel port style hookup. The computer that runs it is old. (It still runs windows 95). At some point it is going to quit on me. So I wanted to be able to upgrade it to a serial type of communication.
#2 I would like to build about a 6âx10â CNC table that is heavier duty. When I first started researching, Arduino kept coming up as the microcontroller of choice to run it.
To learn more I found a series of videos on YouTube. The instructor mentioned a âsuper starter kitâ so I bought the super starter kit and followed about 20-30 of his tutorials, learning (and forgetting more than I remembered) from the easiest project up. There is lots of code I have written I have not used yet and many projects I havenât gotten around to yet, like the CNC table for example. But, I think, because I started small I never actually have gotten overwhelmed and lost interest in a project.
My biggest problem about starting/finishing a project is that Arduino is a hobby for me. Most weeks I work anywhere from 60-70 hours at work, plus we have a small beef cattle ranch that I work on the weekends. Our ranch is where the salvaged gate operators go I mentioned in an earlier post. I donât have a lot of time to build a hobby project.
It would be pretty awesome to get paid to incorporate Arduino into my regular work from time to time. But then again, if it was an everyday thing it might become âworkâ and not a âhobbyâ and lose its luster.
All that to say that maybe you are taking to big of a bite at a time.
I like to say my motivation for doing Arduino things comes from morbid curiosity, I need to know how things work, and the (relatively) simple Atmel 328 based MCUs really caught my attention once I found the Arduino platform. After years of playing around, I know how to control all the registers, peripherals, IRQs, and have built a number of widely used Arduino libraries myself.
Projects donât all have to be super complicated or even physical, doing something like creating a library like you were trying to do or modifying existing libraries to enhance functionality is great, it helps the whole community. One of the most important parts is to share your code, even with a halfway written library, publishing your work to GitHub or other platforms can really help others who are attempting similar things, and you can come back to it easily if interest peaks again.
When it comes down to it, I donât think you should have to force yourself to complete projects, it should be enjoyable and utilize your existing skill-set to a degree. Start small, think modular, and you can build some amazing things beginning from small & simple projects.