Often, when I get the itch to build an electronics circuit or tinker with my microcontrollers, I’ll try an example project from a book or website.
I have a ridiculous number of sensors (thanks to the three beginner Arduino kits I own), but they’re scattered across three cases, many individually wrapped in miniature plastic bags. That makes it hard to know what I have or quickly find the parts I need for a circuit I’m interested in.
To fix that, I cataloged my parts so I could tell at a glance whether I had everything needed without pulling anything out. I took photos and reorganized everything so that, for most tinkering sessions, I only need to grab one kit. I cut the number of jumper wires down to a handful: usually just one black for ground, one red for power, and a couple others for connections.
It’s not perfect, but it should hold me over until I finally 3D print some Gridfinity parts and move everything out of storage bins and into a drawer.
While my parts were out, I also followed one of those aforementioned tutorials. I’ve been reading Basic Electronics for Tomorrow’s Inventors by Nick Dossis as a way to strengthen my understanding of the fundamentals—things like resistors, capacitors, and reading circuit diagrams and spec sheets.
I built a blinking LED circuit with a 555 IC, a capacitor, and a few resistors to control the timing. The process gave me a newfound appreciation for programmable microcontrollers. The same project can be done with an Arduino, zero wires (using the onboard LED), and only a few lines of code. It’s often the first project in any Arduino tutorial. While building it without an Arduino was still easy, it did require some math to choose the resistor and capacitor values for the blink rate I wanted.
In the end, I had a blinking LED, a slightly neater parts collection, and the smug satisfaction of knowing I could have done it all with an Arduino in 30 seconds. But it’s a tiny, rhythmic reminder that every skill is built one blink at a time.