Skip to content

Comment on It's just wood

Comments

I had this sort of moment, and it's pushing me to want to learn to build real things. Things I can hold.

I'm graduating from college and for my senior design project we can do almost anything. One of my professors asked me and a few of my friends to build a guitar-strummer for kids with severe cerebral palsy at a nearby school. We're all bioengineers, and I study CS. We had never built anything more complicated than a Lego.

After a few months, here's what we came up with: http://www.instructables.com/id/Musex/

It's pretty janky and it's something a mechanical engineer could whip up in a week or two. But we learned a TON building it. There's so much I don't know. I like building things on the computer because there's near-zero marginal cost and you can always start right away. Having to think through a real design and order/build parts really shed some light on getting things done beyond a mouse and keyboard.

TL;DR - Go build something. It's very empowering.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.