this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
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Oh. Good point.
Unrelated, but anyone deep enough in the comments to read this, you might consider checking out the game Stationeers - a brutally complex base/space station/colony building game that will eat years of your life if you let it, stay away. Huge fun.
It’s suggestions like these that make me glad I don’t have a gaming rig.
Could you live without learning a made-up assembly-like programing language just so you can have your solar panels track the sun, only to find out you know very little about "azimuth" and "elevation" and now your potatoes aren't growing because you can't power that grow light.
I mean, you could, but are you even living at that point?
Did you mention how fun it is to find out you got your gaseous fuel stoichiometry wrong? It's a blast.
I’ve actually done both those things in real life believe it or not. But for the solar tracking I went lazy and used a pair of photoresistors and some canned PID code with a little tuning for my motor.
And I fix lawnmowers for most of my neighborhood.
You're doing it wrong brother, if you're doing it IRL that's work, good riddance...
But for real, that's really cool! You hooked up a motor and photo resistors to a controller you've programmed? Bonkers. Do you have any write up about it? super curious about how you did it.
I used to teach tech making to students in a program and we did all kinds of little projects with microcontrollers and basic electronics, but also laser cutters and early 3D printing (pre makerbot). Almost 20 years ago now, so most of the documentation is lost to time.
Arduinos are fun to play with though, there’s lots of examples and libraries out there, and the clone market means you can get them in 5 packs for only a few dollars. Motor controller boards, all kinds of sensor breakouts and tiny servos are also cheap as chips these days.
You could spend the rest of your free time on that too!
Never messed with arduinos specifically, but I've built a few projects throught the years with ESPs, those things are dirt cheap and very fun to work with! Nothing with motors though - mostly attaching them to sensors and batteries to collect data, or control lighting (LED/RGB strips, etc).
There's just *way * too many interesting things in the world, and so little free time! It's a tragedy really... :)
Hope you can find the time and life conditions to embrace the projects you love. Have a great day!