One of my greatest frustrations with working with building electronics is my inability to get things built correctly, straightly and tightly. 📐I have gotten better breaking plexiglass by carefully scoring it, and using a straight edge when cutting foam board. But I’m still not really happy with the way things come out.🗡 I’m not measuring things carefully, glue things together too fastly, not getting the corners to a perfect fit by any measure. Things just come out amateur looking. The one plexiglass box I built came out pretty good, until I cracked it fixing it a lose connections.S

Then there is the problem with soldering things up only to discover a connection is incorrect and has to be repaired. 🔬I really should test things more before I solder them, double check my work and go more slowly. But some of that is I’m just learning things, and if you don’t break things, it’s hard to learn the correct way or the limitation of materials. Some of it comes from my many years of writing scripts and various programs on a desktop computer — if you break something in software, it’s usually just matter of fixing it.💔 Things in the virtual world aren’t as easy to rebuild as things in software. Mistakes, especially involving too much current usually end up smelling like toxic smoke.🔥☠

After spending so much money (okay, probably under $300) and time on my electronics hobby over the past winter, I have to admit I’m fairly disappointed with my results.🤡 Sure my LED lights and clock work okay, but they’ve still come out somewhat below my expectations for fit and finish. Maybe my standards were too high — I can’t build professional-grade manufactured products as a hobbyist in my own bedroom.💻

Then again, maybe what I’m physically building is not as important as what I am learning. 📚Each connection I solder and re-solder is more practice. Slowly cutting the plexiglass and trimming up the foam board produces results.🗃 Re-working materials over time can produce good results. And if I break things it’s not necessarily going to break the bank. But I’m still a bit disappointed.