Maybe try out new hobbies or a side project! Another thing is excercise will definitely help out

@Condor Glad to hear! I have a ton of content from my circuits and capstone projects I'll be posting more of! :)

@j4cobgarby I used a reflow oven with solder paste. So basically a paste that melts into solder. However you can do this pretty easily with a heat gun and paste if you get a PCB stencil. Like the one in this picture

@BigBoo The after shock from completing a project is so enjoyable! Especially when you can actually use it in your daily routine afterwards!

Really appreciate your kind words man. I love doing this kind of stuff and seeing everyone working on their own projects only drives my passion more 😁

@Condor thank you! Really appreciate it :) This was done using a reflow (toaster) oven using solder paste and a stencil from oshstencils.com. I touched up parts that didn't receive enough heat with a heat gun afterwards.

This PCB was ordered through oshpark.com. really good quality PCBs! I've used them before on separate projects in the past and have no complaints.

@BigBoo very true! This is my semester long project for my senior computer engineering course. So not much I could do with the requirements :P

@Scade thank you! This was pizza oven style, toasted until well done 🍕

@FilipeRamalho Come to the embedded side 📟

I'm an undergrad computer engineer so this has been my life for the past 3 years hahaha my previous project was being lead software engineer for my electric car capstone project. Worked with CI servers on a raspberry pi down to the event based super loop actually controlling the car :)

@FilipeRamalho I'd love to provide some info!

The brain of this is an atmel 32u4 8bit microcontroller. So no single board computer here (uses too much power for my application). The various other chips on the board are an eeprom for storage, a real time clock for recording dates/time, accelerometer for tracking the motion of your arm, a bluetooth chip for talking to a phone and an oled display (not pictured). All in all it's turning out better than expected :)

@nate Sure thing! (Everything is on my GitHub btw schematic, board and code)

So I started with breakout baords on a breadboard and wrote some basic code to make sure everything works together. Then I took all those breakout boards designs (♥️ open source hardware) and replicated the designs and combined them onto one schematic/board using eagle PCB design sw. I verified everything was connected properly based on those schematics for things like oscillators, power and ground pins.

I exported the board in a Gerber files (basically describe how to make the board for machines) and sent that off to a PCB manufacturer called oshpark.com. couple weeks later I get the board and start soldering!

I'd highly recommend it as you get that nothing to full design and feel that much prouder of it being that you built everything from scratch :)

@j4cobgarby I went through oshpark.com! Very nice and great service!

@Biggy it's incredible stuff! I love that feeling, to see how far my skills have come

Water cooling must be pretty easy at that point