Notes · Mindset
Let the magic smoke out
Everyone starts with basic projects. A blinking LED. A sensor that reads the wrong number. A battery that's flat by morning. That's not a sign you're bad at this. It's the start line, and everyone who is good at this stood on it once.
It's also fine for a project not to work, as long as you learn from it.
I fail regularly. Two of the build logs on this site began as things that didn't work: a board that only booted 95% of the time, and a soil sensor that went flat in three weeks. Neither fix would exist if the first attempt had worked.
Five people who failed first
We remember these people as titans. We tend to forget how often they got it wrong on the way.
Thomas Edison
Before the light bulb worked in 1879, his team tested thousands of filament materials, and most of them burned out in minutes. Carbonised cotton thread gave the first long-lasting bulb, and carbonised bamboo came later. Each failure narrowed the search.
The Wright brothers
Their 1900 and 1901 gliders made far less lift than the published data predicted. Wilbur later recalled saying that people wouldn't fly for a thousand years. They built their own wind tunnel, tested about 200 wing shapes, found the textbook numbers were wrong, and flew on 17 December 1903.
James Dyson
He built 5,127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum over about five years. Even after that, no major manufacturer would take it on. It went on sale in Japan first, and his own DC01 finally launched in 1993.
Walt Disney
His first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt in 1923. A few years later he lost the rights to his hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to his distributor. He started again, and Mickey Mouse arrived in 1928.
J.K. Rowling
Twelve publishers turned down the first Harry Potter manuscript. The thirteenth, Bloomsbury, published it in 1997.
Talk doesn't build
To win at any of the things on this site, you need to dream first. That might be a solar system that gets through an Adelaide winter, a LoRa link over a hill, or an ESP32 that runs for months on a small battery. Then you need to build it.
Opinions are cheap. Anyone can talk.
But talk doesn't build. Talk doesn't create. Talk doesn't win.
I would rather be real, fail, learn and rise again than waste my life trying to impress people who will never understand me.
What to expect
- Expect to see magic smoke. Sooner or later a part will let it out, whether from reversed polarity, the wrong regulator or a probe that slipped. Once it's out it never goes back in, and you'll never make that mistake again.
- Expect the code not to work the first time. Or the fifth. The REPL in Thonny is there for exactly this.
- Expect the datasheet or the forum post to be wrong now and then. The Wright brothers had to measure things for themselves, and sometimes so will you.
- Expect the satisfaction. When you finally solve the problem and the thing you dreamed about actually works, it's enormous. It's worth every failure it took to get there.
Failing often is the goal. Failing expensively isn't. Use a bench supply with the current limit turned down, prove circuits on a breadboard before they go on a PCB, save a copy of code that works before you change it, and write down what went wrong. A failure you wrote down is a lesson. One you didn't is likely to happen again.
So fail, and do it often, because that's how you learn. Then go and build the thing.