• Question: what is your favourite/best home project you have undergone (something you took upon yourself to do for, for fun perhaps, in your spare time)?

    Asked by Benbtl.engineer to Jamie, Kristen, Sheun, Simon, Will on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Sheun Oshinbolu

      Sheun Oshinbolu answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      About 3 years ago I decided to learn how to knit. I bought books and knitting needles and invested time to learn from the beginning. I’ve so far made a couple of scarves and snoods. My next project will be to make a sweater for winter!!

    • Photo: William Scott-Jackson

      William Scott-Jackson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      My most ambitious project that I was unable to finish but made some good progress on was something I called the Automated Desktop Assistant.

      The idea was that I’d make a device that would be complimentary to your desktop PC. There was a set of LED lights that worked as a sound bar; I placed a microphone in my speakers so when music played the LEDs would light up depending on how loud the notes of the music were. I got that working very well and I still use it to show off what young people can achieve with electronics.

      The parts that were missing was a temperature sensor that would use an LCD display to show you the temperature of the room. And I’d have liked it to have made it possible so you could have used the buttons on the device to control the music playing from your speakers. I got as far as writing a program that would load your music up, shuffle and play it but I needed to crack how to get commands from the device to the program over USB which didn’t go so well 🙁

      I did that because it was fun!

    • Photo: Jamie Johnston

      Jamie Johnston answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      The best project so far was taking an old battered guitar and making it like new again, re-painting and polishing, setting it up so that everything was perfectly in alignment. It was a big learning curve but means that I can make all of my instruments play how I want them to.

      Currently I’m trying to recreate a guitar amplifier from the 1950’s using old valve technology!

    • Photo: Simon Marchant

      Simon Marchant answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      My favourite home project is still in development: I’m an avid fan of tea, but I can be a bit silly and forget that I’ve made a cup while I’m waiting for it to cool from about the temperature of the surface of the sun. So I’m making a little sensor to put in my cups of tea that will ring a bell when it’s the perfect temperature!

      Tea is life.

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