This doesn’t make me (or Perplexity for that matter) perfect, but I suspect I’m better than average at getting my facts straight. Still, even in my case, this AI-centric research pattern seems problematic to me. But why? Keep reading.

Fewer website visits = fewer ad dollars = less useful information

Consider the web of a decade ago, or maybe even two. When you needed an obscure bit of information, you searched for it via Google, Yahoo, HotBot, AltaVista, et al…

Read more

[June 22nd, 2026] Recently, I took on a rather large project for a client (SparkFun), which amounts to creating a custom synthesizer with their hardware, including the Teensy 4.1/Audio Shield. When I first proposed it, I thought it would be a cool build that would take me X hours to finish.2

I think it will be an awesome build when finished [it is, keep reading]. However, like what seems like every build project that I accept (for myself or others), it’s taking me longer than I anticipated (at ~X+10 hours now). I have made a huge amount of progress on the build, but getting it working (and documented) is still going to take a non-negligible amount of extra effort.3

In other words, I’m at the point in this project where things start to become a bit of a slog. And I’m getting paid for the finished build/documentation, not an 80%-finished thing that sort of works. So I have to get it done. And I don’t always feel inspired to tackle the “heart” of the build (whatever that may be) even though I was so excited about it when it was first proposed.

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But I’m not worried. I’ve been here many times in my engineering career, both working for myself and for others. The rather ridiculously obvious solution to such a challenge is:

Just keep working at it

Rather than procrastinating on this sort of big project — whether it’s a physical build; an intellectual product, e.g. a an article; or some combination, e.g. a build plus documentation — just work on the project in whatever manner that you currently feel like you can. This could mean running wires, taking pictures, cleaning up your BOM (bill of materials), drilling holes. Whatever. Just keep putting in the hours.

Put another way, get the little tasks done that may or may not seem like the crux of your project, and you’ll progress toward the metaphorical center as you nibble away at the edges. Work on the little things — which eventually add up to big things — and at some point, like magic, the project is done.

The above paragraph might seem rather obvious. However, when I brought this up to an engineering colleague of mine years ago he was in total agreement, noting that he’d discussed this phenomenon with another colleague who we both respected and worked with in multiple capacities.

How do you eat an elephant?

At another past employer, we were having machinery/production challenges, trying to increase yields and decrease rejected parts. It seemed like a rather impossible task on the whole, and at one point my boss asked me what seemed like a rather ridiculous question at the time: “How do you eat an elephant?” The correspondingly ridiculous answer: “one bite at a time.”

But this wasn’t actually a ridiculous question, or even a rather marginal dad joke. There’s a lot of truth in this mini-parable. We did, in fact, make some significant improvements over the time that I spent there, cutting the reject rate on what was arguably the factory’s most important machine in half. It took years, but we did eat that elephant, or at least a good portion of it, in bite-sized chunks.

Like magic, things became better — after years of consistent work.

Will I finish my current project?

[July 3rd, 2026] After writing the above opening a week or two ago, I did keep chipping away at the project. And I now have a reasonably operational synth. It plays a full octave (including sharps/flats) with a keyboard-like arrangement of black and white arcade buttons. Six more buttons on the top of top of those are used for options and sound samples.

Two onboard speakers and a USB battery enable all-in-one portable operation, while a jack on the side allows it to interface with headphones or external equipment. At this point, I think it’s one of my coolest builds ever. A short clip is shown below, and the full build is at the end of this article:

While that might seem like the bulk of this project is done, consider that the other (really the core) requirement is to document it for the promotion of my client and so that someone else could build the same thing without too much trouble. A rough-cut video for them to produce and finalize was also one of the deliverables.

Documentation here is non-trivial, but with the synth operational, it’s (again) a matter of putting in the time and chipping away at the edges. Documentation should be accurate, but a missing semicolon doesn’t blow everything up in the same way that leaving it out of the Arduino C code that runs the synth would.

Project submitted!

[July 17th, 2026] After another ~two weeks of troubleshooting, programming, research, editing, and asking AI questions, I finally submitted my project yesterday for customer approval. I still want to do a few more things to/for the video before submitting it, but I should have that in next week.

As predicted, by chipping away at the edges, I eventually got to the center of a project, even though I have a bit more to do to consider it fully complete. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you aren’t getting anywhere, but that’s just the process. Put in the time, and, like magic, it will get done.4

[August 26th, 2026] The project is fully complete, everything is submitted, and I was paid in full over a week ago. While the documentation was the product, they politely asked if I would be willing to send it over to use in their on-site electronics emporium for others to enjoy.

I agreed, and while it was sad to see it go, after completion these projects often collect dust anyway. Better to have others enjoy it [SparkFun later told me that Paul Stoffregen, creator of the Teensy boards got to try it out and really enjoyed it. How cool is that!]. SparkFun sent me replacement parts to make another synth version, and I actually came up with a breakout board to facilitate this future possibility. Perhaps a new, improved version is forthcoming. Subscribe so you don’t miss it👇 (You’ve read this far, might as well).

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One of these breakouts is being used in a much different audiovisual project [the animatronic cowboy seen here], which takes advantage of some of the same Teensy hardware. That was yet another elephant, but being able to recycle knowledge and parts that you’re familiar with gives you a slightly bigger spoon.

Will I finish my other projects? Should I?

There are many, many projects that I have started over the years that I’ve yet to finish. And I don’t think that all of them will, or even should, be completed. There’s just not enough time in the day/year/my lifetime, and some many of them were pretty harebrained anyway.

And sometimes it’s best to just let a project go. Hopefully I’ve learned something in the process of half-making these ~failed/neglected/abandoned projects, but if you never finish anything (ever) then what have you really accomplished? Learning is good, but applying that learning to cool stuff that you get done is arguably the point — especially when you’re getting paid for it!

Sometimes I consider that maybe I need a “boss” to tell me that I need to finish project X, instead of starting Project Y and leaving that other build to a shelf somewhere. With the synth project that I’ve been discussing here, I did have an ad hoc boss in SparkFun. They presumably weren’t going to pay me if I never finished.

Such a boss might also tell me not to start other frivolous projects that I’m not getting paid for. Perhaps that’s the toughest part about working for yourself. You can only do so much. As my own boss, the prospect of starving, being thrown out on the street, or… gasp, getting a normal job is an excellent motivator.

The synth goes live!

[October 15th, 2026] As noted earlier, I submitted the writeup on July 16th, then a rough-cut video per my contract on July 24th, and invoiced on the same day. They paid me in a timely manner, but waited until today to release the video and writeup (I believe).

It’s awesome to see this go live (and to be able to put this post out). Hopefully it will inspire others to build something similar, and hopefully my new improved version… just might be forthcoming. Teensy breakout boards to make the wiring easier are for sale on SmallRun if you’re considering giving it a try! Maybe I’ll even sell finished synths in addition to the boards at some point.

Finished synths wouldn’t cheap — I have bags of food to buy5 — but let me know if you might interested!

Thanks for reading! -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Get in touch: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply if you’re reading this as an email!

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Addendum/Footnotes:

Editorial note: I accidentally sent out two posts last week that were meant for later this year and may not have even been finished. I unpublished as soon as I could, but if you got them, well thanks for sticking around! I’m planning to publish/re-publish them at a normal interval toward the end of the year, so please bear with me if you get them twice.

For the last 20 years or so, computer monitors have typically been flat, saving desk space — and people’s backs during installation and transport — versus the CRT behemoths that came before. At the same time, viewable monitor sizes have steadily been getting larger, with better and better resolutions1. But look closely at the back of most modern monitors, and you’ll find something else cool,2 a VESA bolt pattern that allows you to use a plethora of stands to hold it up.

OR you can attach accessories it. This is certainly less common, but I find it to be quite useful and something that you should keep in mind for… whenever it might come in handy.

VESA mounting provides a convenient way to hang up your monitor in ways that would have never been considered in decades past — like my wall-mounted setup seen above. This puts is a lot of torque on the 2x4 mounted to the wall that holds it, but nothing compared to what a 32 inch CRT would produce. And I don’t have to use a fork lift to get it in here!

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VESA patterns3, come in several different flavors, but 100 x 100 mm seems to be the norm for computer monitors, with M4 bolts used for attachment. It is certainly useful to keep your monitor in place, but consider that this standardized pattern can also be used to mount accessories to the monitor itself.

Below are several examples of mounting accessories to the monitor, and one neat way to mount your monitor to the wall. Read on if you’re ready to take your back-of-the-monitor game to the next level!

Small form factor (SFF) PC computer mount

Traditionally, a computer goes somewhere next to the monitor it’s controlling, but as processing devices have gotten smaller and smaller, small form factor (SFF) PCs can actually attach to the back of a monitor with no issue. You’ll just need the proper mount — I designed one (available here) for my BeeLink Mini PC that you can use as-is, modify, or just peruse for inspiration.

Arduino UNO Q mount

I’m doing a series for Arduino about getting started with the UNO Q4, which has some interesting abilities as a single-board computer and microcontroller development board in one. What it lacks (or lacked), however, is a way to organize the board itself, plus the hub that you need to route signals in power, in a nice package attached to the monitor.

Now, through the power of VESA mounting, you can keep everything in one place, and even transport everything together without too much hassle. Neat!

All-in-one test suite

If you can mount a single-board computer to the back of a monitor, could you also mount an entire test suite based on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Analog Discovery 2? I did such a build in this video, cutting out a backing panel on which to stick electronics bits and even a miniature keyboard for a fully portable setup. While you may or may not need a scope/signal generator like this, consider that my backing plate/Velcro setup could be used to stick just about anything to the back of a monitor, while keeping it clean if and when you need to remove it.

French Cleat

This is a monitor mount, not a mount-to-monitor setup — and not my design — but I still thought this VESA French cleat was cool enough to mention here. The use of French cleats is a (primarily woodworking) technique that uses 45º sections positioned in such a way that they can slide into one another to hold up a cabinet or similar. In this case, the “cabinet” is the computer monitor, and mounting things this way allows the monitor to be positioned very close to the wall.

Of course, this means that you can’t really adjust where the monitor faces, but I guess that’s the tradeoff to such a setup. Of course, you might also consider designing a wall-style cleat section that fits on the VESA mount, allowing accessories to hang off of the back of the monitor as if it was the wall.

MOAR VESA ideas

With the exception of the French cleat setup, these builds mostly boil down to mounting things to your monitor in semi-portable setup. Simple, but potentially quite useful. Personally, I’d like to see this expanded, perhaps with people using it to mount microphones, lighting, cameras… maybe even a fan? The possibilities are endless,5 or at least they extend further than most would normally consider. I hope this sparks some ideas! -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Get in touch: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply if you’re reading this as an email!

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1

As a kid, someone showed me Doom on what at the time seemed like a GIGANTIC monitor used mostly for CAD work. While it certainly seemed scary at the time, the graphics didn’t seem great because they were blown up so much on this “very large” screen. I think it was something like 21 inches.

My current monitor — which certainly weighs much less than that “huge” monitor did — measures 32” diagonally, which is roughly twice the viewable area. I didn’t do the math personally 👇

Also, the resolution is much better, and I suspect the price of mine was is significantly lower when adjusted for inflation. And I bought it five years ago, so there are probably better monitors on the market now. Bigger is mostly better in this case, but 32 inches, plus my laptop screen to the side, seems nearly optimal for my use case.

3

VESA stands for Video Electronics Standards Association, which does more than specify bolt patterns. Nonetheless, people associate this bolt pattern with the term “VESA mount” in much the way that controls engineers might refer to “DIN rail” as a section of extruded metal on which you hang electronics in a panel. DIN, or Deutsches Institut für Normung does much more than specify dimensions of rail on which to hang electronics.

Actually, given DIN’s scope (there are around 30,000 DIN standards!), it’s especially ridiculous to think of it in only this particular context. Also, I’m told its pronounced “deen” in Germany, not “d-in” as was my understanding from working as a manufacturing engineer in South Carolina. That said, I’m not sure the term “deen rail,” or “deen schiene(?)” is even a term in Germany. It’s strange how language evolves.

Read on to hear how I missed my original flight in Atlanta, bought a speaker system that wasn’t great for too much money (a metaphor for Vegas in general?), assembled a robot, took video of (part) of the show, and lots more. As for the show itself, TL;DR: it was probably good, but I’m really not the person to ask.

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Monday night, August 14th, 2026 — a bit of a blur as I write this — I was scheduled on an ~8:00 PM flight out of Tampa with a connection in Las Vegas to put me in at ~11:30 PM after the 3-hour time change. Late, but manageable. At ~6:00 PM Tampa Time, however, things started to get manic. I was informed that my initial flight was delayed, leaving just 18 minutes to catch the next flight, and a possible missed connection.

That wasn’t going to work.

(Getting to) the show must go on

The next best option was a flight leaving at 5:15 AM the next morning for an ~ 8:00 AM flight from Atlanta touching down at ~9:30 AM. After a few hours of sleep at home, I left for my 3:30 AM (!) airport departure. The one bright spot was that I was upgraded(?) to a (middle) exit seat on the ATL-Las Vegas leg.

However, I failed to secure armrest dominance versus the aisle dweller in my section, and ended up squirming and being somewhat uncomfortable for a good portion of the flight. I think that person was at the conference. I dutifully avoided him.

[Wed, September 16th, 8:45 PM Las Vegas airport time: I am so tired. Does this writing make sense? Will edit later. Or should I? Maybe this in-the-moment reporting will be interesting when I look at it later]

Touching down in Las Vegas, I had much more energy than had any right to expect, and when I got to the ground transportation section there was a line of cabs waiting for me (or whoever). What seemed like 15 minutes minutes later I was at the Venetian, and a few minutes after that I had my Autodesk show pass. All I had to do was find my Vegas Vic Neon Cowboy statue and proceed to where it was to be set up. Amazingly, I might actually get there at the 10:30 AM conference start. Things were looking up, but could I maintain this pace? Maybe.

Shipping (and receiving) a big case in Las Vegas

One big worry about this project was actually getting it there in safely, and I give the Venetian FedEx Business Center, FedEx itself, The Mail Room in Palm Harbor, Pelican cases, and myself for packing it well (if I may be so bold) a lot of credit. I shipped it next day from ~Tampa and it was there waiting for me at the business center after paying $30 bail as a receiving fee.

This was probably the right way to do things, as it would have been difficult to lug what looks like Barrett .50 cal case around through the airport and ground transportation. That said, I’m not sure what my client will say about how much it cost to get it there. When I told one regular reader2 to guess how much it cost, my response was that he missed a zero. Not quite, but close enough. I’m sure the state of gas prices these days didn’t help.

Another thing that worked out nicely was sticking an Airtag inside of the case. I could see exactly where it was at all times, and when I showed up to the Fedex business center at the Venetian, they got it out for me in a few minutes. Once the case was extracted from its cardboard mailer packaging, it really did seem like I was lugging a giant case around because I had an important mission. And arguably, I did.

Show setup — more difficult than anticipated (as always)

The plan was to show up the night before, then get up early to assemble the cowboy, which would be easy since LV is 3 hours behind Tampa. As outlined above, that didn’t happen whatsoever. Nonetheless, after securing a space in the back of “The Factory Experience,” i.e. my client’s area3, I got to work putting things together when it probably should have been working.

Like most things of this nature, assembly took at least as long as I had anticipated, though to my relief I didn’t have to employ any of the spare parts that I had brought with me. Save having to re-seat the Teensy board that runs the device, my packaging was apparently sufficient to keep everything safe. There was some discussion about where it should go, and whether it was a risk to passersby, but eventually we got it out on the floor, waving its arms and illuminated LEDs, and saying various “cowboy” phrases that I’d come up with (see video 👇).

Overall, I thought it was success, but there were two issues that may or may not have raised some eyebrows. First, I used an LED strip with its stock controller, in part because my timeline to get this done was very tight, and also to hedge my bets if something went wrong. If everything else broke, at least the LEDs would work (or vice versa), but it also probably didn’t seem as technical or interactive as it could have been if controlled directly by the Teensy.

This was (again, under a significant time constraint) probably the right move. The other issue was that, while it sounded good in my garage, it just wasn’t loud enough to be easily heard in the gigantic indoor space that is the Venetian conference center. Thus my adventure on day two:

Moar volume — Boom boxes are hard to come by in Vegas

In addition to its onboard speakers, the cowboy can easily be hooked up to an auxiliary speaker input… if one is available. But I didn’t bring my auxiliary speaker because… it sounded fine in the garage. Here I did not entirely hedge my bets and left my portable speaker/amp at home, and ended up trying to find a boombox with an appropriate auxiliary input on the Las Vegas strip.

In case you’re wondering, neither Walgreens nor CVS in Las Vegas has such a thing, and rather than just taking a cab to a ~nearby Guitar Center (as I should have), I went to the nearby mall where I was told there was an Apple store. However, Apple no longer sells a speaker with an aux input, even with an adapter. Dick’s Sporting Goods in the mall did sell a speaker that appeared like it would work. Success!(?)

After purchase of said speaker and a bit of finagling, the Cowboy was loud enough to be heard appropriately.4 Long story short, if you think you might need an aux speaker, just bring it. The one spare part and/or tool that you decide not to bring will always be the one you need.

Also, just take a cab to Guitar Center if you’re ever in my situation. I would be shocked if they didn’t have something that would have worked.

Between setup on the first day, negotiating for a spot/convincing the venue that it was safe, getting filmed in various roles, three hours of time changes, a boombox quest, and missing lunch, I was exhausted on Wednesday afternoon. But I was supposed to document the show for my client as well. So one more thing to take care of.

I took video… of The Factory Experience ONLY

I was anticipating taking video of the entire show, or at least the Expo — like a trade show with mostly Autodesk-adjacent vendors. However, that afternoon I was informed that I was only allowed to film my client’s Factory Experience area since I didn’t have official press credentials. While this threw me for a bit of a loop, I was quite tired. At least there was a decent amount of stuff to see in The Factory Experience that I could film.

While I’d already gone through most of The Experience under another cameraman’s direction, I filmed my own take on it. Or, more accurately, I mostly interviewed/filmed Jonathan, the creator of the Factory Experience and the macro pad that you get to build (he can be seen triggering my Cowboy in the video above).

He did a great job, and given that I only had a few hours left, this got me out of a bit of a jam since I needed something submit. So a big thanks to him.

Leaving Las Vegas

With this last bit done, I packed my (what I now realize is an extremely heavy) bag, said my goodbyes, and headed to the airport. While I could have taken my time and seen more of Vegas, I really wasn’t in the mood. I just wanted to get to the airport and sit down. Perhaps even type up some of my experience when it was fresh and after having some food. A significant chunk of this article is a product of my tired wait in the airport.5

Several hours later, I entered the plane, secure in the fact that I had a window/exit row seat and could hopefully get some sleep. And somehow the middle seat never filled in! Interestingly, at ~6’4”, 245 pounds, I am a large man. However, the person on the aisle seat was maybe a tiny bit taller than me, and much larger — athletic, not fat. He was also extremely friendly, and a short conversation before takeoff/sleep revealed that he was a former FSU offensive lineman.

So maybe whoever was in the middle seat saw the situation and turned around (very unlikely). Or maybe the crew saw the situation and intervened (also very unlikely, but maybe possible).

Sadly, I slept very little, though large aisle guy looked like he had no such problem. The flight from Atlanta to Tampa was similarly middle-seat-free, though the person tangent to the aircraft’s circumference (weirdly, there was no window) was a small woman. Amazingly (to me) she was able to curl up toward the wall with her legs on a backpack or something. Such a maneuver is out of the question for me, though if I were to become flexible enough to sit with my legs straight up in the air and parallel to my chest, that would open up some possibilities.6

So how was the actual Autodesk University show? How was Las Vegas?

I have no idea. I was so busy with the aforementioned tasks that I had very little time to actually take things in like I had hoped. It’s strange, you think of traveling to different locations for business as exotic, and perhaps fun, but in my limited experience it’s more like you’re in a building that could be anywhere, but it just happens to be in X, Y, or Z. Parts of it are nice, but at times you’re so busy that you don’t really get to see much.

To be fair, “no idea” isn’t quite true. I got to walk the floor a bit, and saw some cool stuff including a cool truck-camper van combo thing. And The Factory Experience, the bit that I was allowed to film, was quite cool.

The scale of the Venetian is truly impressive. Also, Vegas’ ability to host conferences is like nowhere else I’ve ever seen. There appeared to be at least three other conferences going on, and the city was entirely unfazed. It was a normal Tuesday/Wednesday apparently.

Both aspects were nice, but I saw a very limited slice of either. Also, I didn’t gamble whatsoever, though that’s not something I do anyway.

A ~sequel at CES?

In early 2027, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) takes place in Las Vegas. There is some talk of using this device for the show there as well, perhaps with a retrofit to better fit the tech-centric theme. While I don’t know if this will happen, I’d certainly love the opportunity to work on it again, especially if I get the contract with a bit more time to experiment.

If it happens, perhaps I’ll plan to get there a bit earlier to allow myself a bit more setup time. Plus that might give me a bit more slack if anything goes awry. How about you? Any trade show/business travel tips/experiences I should know about? Do let me know in the comments. -JC

Related Posts/content:

• Hiring Specialists - the Good, the Bad & How to Work Nicely With Others

• Auto-Revision Your 3D-Printed Assemblies to Keep Parts Coordinated (& Yourself Sane)

• Covering The Autodesk University 2025 Trade Show

• Vegas Neon Cowboy build on Hackster.io

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Get in touch: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply if you’re reading this as an email!

Note: Some links may be affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

Going non-solo here was a good decision, but it wasn’t without its stresses. Read on for more about the pros and cons working with someone else, and my thoughts on how to do it well.

A little background: My client (Hackster.io) gave me the assignment to make this Vegas Cowboy roughly a month before it was needed for the Autodesk University 2026 show in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was a rather tight timeline, meaning that I ideally needed the art back a week or two. I could have tried to draw a cowboy myself, but offloading this cutout would free up my time to make the cowboy’s animatronic structure, and the result would likely be much better when finished.

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And yes, I could have just come up with some AI rendering of a cowboy, but Jay suggested taking pictures of me and using it as the base for the model. I would have never thought to to this — or done it on my own as it seems a bit self-aggrandizing — but it did turn out nicely.

All that said, on to the pros, cons, and tips for working with others:

Working with others: The Good

If you do things correctly, working with others can be a great experience. It’s like a force multiplier — your client pays you, you pay collaborators, and the client gets a great project. This allows you to accomplish more than you could have on your own, and potentially even make more money. In this case:

• The project’s art turned out way better than what I could have done on my own.

• Jay uses a known (to him) supplier to get it printed appropriately.

• Offloading the project’s art saved me a lot of time. This is always useful, but in this case it was especially valuable since I had a tight deadline.

• I was able to hire someone and give him money in exchange for something useful. This is generally a nice thing to do, especially if you’re working with someone you like.

Working with others: The Bad

As good as working with others can be — and it was here — it’s not without its downsides:

• It Costs Money — This isn’t necessarily bad (more on this later), and as stated above it’s cool to pay people you like. However, if this isn’t managed properly it can kill a project’s profitability. Not bad per se, but something to keep in mind.

• Communication can be difficult — Again, more on this later, but it takes skill and time to properly communicate your requirements.1

• It is stressful depending and waiting on others — Jay/the printer he used got the cutout back to me in a timely manner, but I was stressed out before I had it in my hands. Perhaps they wouldn’t get it done on time; maybe the scale would be grossly off… Maybe this would be be because of some miscommunication between me, Jay, and/or the printer that could be my fault!2

At the end of the day, none of these were a substantial impediment to successfully completing the project. As I write this, it’s all boxed up and ready to ship to the show.

How to play work well with others

It was awesome that I know Jay, and I could be confident he would do a good job because I’m familiar with his other work. And he/the printer did. But I still worried about it. If I had to find someone like him at a moment’s notice, this would have difficult, especially since I would have to trust something critical to an unknown person.

So, here are my thoughts on how to work with others, with the caveat that I don’t actually do it that often:

1. Get to know interesting/useful people before you need their skills — This isn’t always simple or possible. I know Jay through a local hackerspace (i.e. shared workshop) that I was a member of for several years, and such organizations seem to be filled with people with eclectic skills. What this “space” will look like in your context might be different, but don’t be afraid to get out there and network. Better to have the contact(s) waiting for a problem than have to search around when you’re in a panic.3

2. Expect communication/back-and-forth after the initial order between you and the person you’re working with. If all goes well, this can lead to a better result, but understanding requirements and iteration does take time, which you need to factor in to the overall project. Also, know when to accept recommendations and when to push things in your direction. What this means will vary depending on the job.

3. Get pricing/terms in writing — Initially Jay quoted me a rough price… based on a rough price that the printer gave him. Long story short, the printer ended up charging Jay much more than he had been told initially, and Jay asked me to pay more than what I was initially expecting. Which I did without much argument or hard feelings as the price was partially contingent on what the printer would charge.
   
   Under normal circumstances, I should have gotten pricing upfront, in writing, and Jay should have probably done the same with the printer. In both of our defenses, things often get a bit nebulous when there’s a time crunch. At the end of the day though, I’m just glad the cutout got back on time and the project is ready to ship. All that being said, get pricing/conditions in writing if you can!
   
   Also notable, the printer in question made a… personnel change to avoid this sort of inaccurate quoting in the future, verbal estimate or not. Their quality was quite good, so I would be happy to work with them (through Jay) in the future.

   

4. Just because someone is your friend, you still need to pay them — It’s an interesting dynamic when you work with someone you know who would possibly do you a favor if you asked, because you have to get across a message that is essentially: Give me a reasonably low price, but I don’t want a gift, and I don’t want you to suffer for the privilege of working with me.4
   
   I’ve come across this situation before when I needed a component made quickly as part of an assembly that I was selling. The person/company that I asked to do the job might have made it for free if I asked nicely, but not paying them would be improper. They did a good job, quickly and at what seemed like a fair price. However, trying to drive a hard fair bargain, while also not requesting too much special treatment, is a somewhat unusual position to take.5

5. Make sure you charge enough so that you can pay subcontractors enough too. This hasn’t been the case for all my projects, but here I was able to pay Jay what he requested while still (fingers crossed) turning a profit.
   
   This is something to consider whether pricing one-off work or making doodads to sell on a site like our sponsor SmallRun. Eventually you might want to contrat things out and/or work with a distributor — which cut into your profit margin, but can potentially increase your volume and decrease your hassle/part. If you don’t set the price high enough initially, your options may be more limited.

And, since you asked (maybe), here’s a little preview of the almost finished cowboy in action. I’ll eventually publish a more involved writeup here on Hackster, and they’re supposed to publish a full video of it as well.

Conclusion: Yes, work with others

At the end of the day, this project would not have gone as well had I not worked with Jay. Yes, it was stressful in its own way, and did cost some money out of the project’s budget, but it was worth doing so in both respects.

Now, however, it’s on to the next working-with-others challenge, getting the Neon Cowboy to Las Vegas for display. With the exception of a few shoulder cuts (one seen in the middle of my spare parts/tools on the left) it’s all stuffed in a large Pelican case that was likely designed for rifles rather than random animatronic displays:

The Venetian in Las Vegas, where the event takes place, appears to be well set up for this kind of thing, with a FedEx Business Center on-site to receive and distribute packages. Locally, I’ve become friendly with Ken at the Mail Room here in Palm Harbor, Florida. I’m sure he’ll be able to advise me about the right way to send this — and charge a fair rate. It’s good to know people.6

More on this particular adventure soon. As you may have noticed, my publishing schedule has been a little wonky as of late, in a large part because I’ve been quite busy with client projects. Also, I’m publishing this on a Friday, rather than my usual Wednesday at 11:30 AM ET, as I’m literally going to send this package off in a hour or so, and I may try to get a post about the conference up next.

So this is all good, but I wanted to get that out there for regular readers. And thank you so much for being a regular reader. Or an intermittent/first time reader. All are appreciated. Slowing things down does give you time to catch up if needed. We can all use a little slack from time to time! -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

2

Like in Spinal Tap, when the guy wants a model of Stonehenge (using a bit of coarse language), but his napkin drawing has “ (inches) instead of ‘ (feet), which is what he really wanted. Everyone ended up looking quite silly and getting frustrated.

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OK, you’re still here. Thanks for your faith in my ability to make this somewhat interesting and/or educational. Yes, revisioning a part/drawing is basically the process of adding a note on the document to indicate that you made a change, and typically putting some sort of mark on the part itself to show what revision (i.e. rev) it is.

This procedure is quite important in the real, industrial world, since you don’t want to figure something out, make an improvement, then forget about it later as you have the wrong part made. Even worse (for someone else), you might have moved on to another job, and improper/no revisioning would then create problems for others that they will have an even harder time solving.2

That said, this process is certainly not as common in the 3D-printed maker/single employee company world, where you don’t have to coordinate within a large organization over years or potentially even decades. But maybe it should be.

Engineering Drawing Revisions

In the world of formal engineering drawings, there is typically a column where you list the revision number, what you changed, and space to put your name or initials beside it. And the parts themselves get stamped/lasered/marked somehow with the revision, date, and your initials for posterity. I suspect there are still many pieces of tooling floating around — maybe even being made today — with “JSC” emblazoned on them, making JSC either famous or infamous in a section northwestern South Carolina.

Some entities use more formalized engineering change management systems… others just put up posters of who you might displease if you get the drawings out of order. Neither was a part of the infamous JSC’s experience.

3D-Printed Auto-Revisioning

Now — years later — I find myself designing and iterating the large device that I’m working on while much of it is literally being constructed on my 3D printer. The client gave me a rather tight timeline to get it done, so the build must push ahead. In addition to custom 3D-printed parts, the inside frame of of the device is made out of 20 x 20 mm aluminum extrusion, and the outside will be made out of foam board when I get it back from the printer — inspired by a certain Las Vegas attraction seen at the end of this post.

There are a variety of 3D-printed parts at play here, which could eventually get confusing, and first iteration (rev 0) might not work with whatever I come up with later. I could revise each part individually (the conventional solution), but here I’m instead creating a new overall revision of the design each time I physically print something.

So while a never-before-made part would stay at the same rev as the part before, If I modify something and print it out, the overall assembly is revised, and any new parts printed assembly-wide will bear this new rev number. Since I’m not working off of an assembly drawing, this overall rev technique at least lets me know if something might be out of date if it doesn’t fit quite right.

If that sounds a little questionable, in a more formalized setting I would probably agree. BUT, if it sounds like a pain to update everything, you are incorrect. The CAD package I’m using, Autodesk Fusion, has a parameter system that allows every part to be updated at the same time. So if you have things set up correctly, you make a change, update the revision once, and it updates all of your parts. Pretty neat.

Fusion does a good job here, but I didn’t mean for it to be the of this article per se.3 They introduced the parametric text feature in 2025, and the same type of functionality is available in other packages according to ChatGPT and my general suspicion. So if you have a bunch of parts to rev, or other notes to update, see if your CAD package supports parametric text.

Fusion, and certainly many other packages, also supports using modeling parameters for dimensional features. So if you, say, have a thickness that will be common to a bunch of parts, just set up a parameter for it. This is helpful in the design phase, and useful to avoid revision inconsistencies… where you forgot to update just that one part.

In this project, I used this feature to keep a consistent screw spacing for parts that attach to the extrusion via screws. I don’t think I’ll need to update this, but it would be trivial to do so after the fact.

A Little Software Learning, a Lot of Improvement

Beyond CAD, if you’re using a complicated software tool, keep your eyes out for features that you don’t (yet) use but that could be helpful to your process. Sure, you might not care about update X, Y, or Z 90% of the time, but sometimes few minutes of discovery and learning can save you significant time and/or headache later!

As for the project itself, well check back later, but below is a little hint! Also, don’t smoke. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

I’ll outline some of my purchased tools at the end, but this post is primarily about building a soldering jig (i.e. a solder squid) that suits my needs. I’ve yet to find one that you can buy that meets all of my requirements!

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The solder squid

Soldering jigs/solder squids/helping hands typically feature a number of positionable arms with alligator clips on the end to hold wires and components in place while you solder them together. My criteria for such a device include:

• Heavy

• Electrically and thermally non-conductive base

• Base won’t melt or burn when heat is applied

• Built-in fume extractor

• Bendable arms that stay in place

There are quite a few squidz available for purchase (this one, for example), but most appear rather light, with bases that may or may not live up to my thermal and electrical requirements. Built-in fume extractors seem to be non-existent, and who knows if the arms will stay solidly in place.

So I made my own. Or, more accurately, I developed one over years of experimentation.

Squid Element 1: Concrete base

What’s strong, heavy, fireproof, non-conductive, and inexpensive? Concrete, of course! One can embed arms in the concrete as it is curing, solving the stay-in-place issue once and for all. I designed a 3D-printed mold for the base (available here) including bosses on which the base of the arms could sit as it cured.

In retrospect, I could probably have just about anything to make a block-o-concrete, though the bosses were a nice touch, leaving me with four perfectly space arms sticking out of the corners. I also coated it with concrete sealant, and added four rubber anti-slip nubs, both of which enhanced the design a bit.

Squid Element 2: Loc-Line arms, alligator clip grippers

As shown above, I embedded the bottom of four Loc-Line hoses in the concrete, which has held up for several years now. To hold the alligator clips securely, I heated up each spout with a heat gun and expanded it with a metal marking tool and/or pick. With just enough space to slide the clips in when hot, when it cools off it forms a tight bond, which, as with the concrete, has held up for several years now.

I also added heat shrink to the jaws in order to prevent piercing softer things that are held in place by them.

Squid Element 3: Fume extractor (USB PC fan)

To make things easy, I used a 5V USB fan as a fume extractor. I zip-tied the cable, and hot glued the corner to one of the arms sans end piece/alligator clip. While I am generally happy with this setup, it could be more powerful, and there’s no on/off button at this point.

A simple latching switch would be easy enough to add. However, I had an idea to use one of my other gadgets to shut this off automatically after a certain amount of time. As so often happens, good here is the enemy of perfect.

Other soldering tools/component lessons

First, if I’m going to define a “good” soldering setup, what was I using when it was much worse? Basically, something like what’s shown below. (though not that item in particular). Plug it in and it heats up to… whatever temperature. For $6, that actually might be a good value, but prepare to be frustrated.

So, besides a custom squid, what soldering tools do I use to raise my game from poor to marginally good? I’m glad you asked, because I get a small % of purchases that you make on Amazon via these links:

• TS100 mini soldering iron - I’ve been using this for nearly a decade, and it’s a HUGE improvement over the plug-in-and-wait ~$10 iron that I was using before. The link is for an upgraded TS101 iron, which I’d assume is as good or better.

• Knipex wire clippers - Not cheap, but really a nice tool if you need to precisely snip a connection.

• Tip cleaner, holder - I’m not going to link these, because what I purchased is either unavailable or way more expensive than what I have. But both of these are a good idea to obtain.

• Hot air gun - not used for manual soldering so much, but when you need to heat up a board for desoldering or even to heat up heat shrink, this is a very convenient tool.

• Hot plate - Like the hot air gun, sometimes you need to heat up a board. The link goes to another article I wrote reviewing different sizes, but the TL;DR: 100 x 100 mm seems to be not too big, not too small.

• Solder sucker - for removal of solder, you need either solder wick or a solder suction device. Plastic blue suckers are available at very low prices, or in kits, but the aluminum type with silicon tips are much better. I got one from “Kotto” which is quite nice, but appears to not be available. This suction device by Engineer (a well-known brand) is likely also quite good. This “FrogBro” model could also be good, though I’m… less familiar with that brand.1

Result: a satisfactory solder squid (and better soldering results)

At the end of the day, soldering is both an art and a science. And like any art or science, you need your brushes and easels or beakers and bunsen burners. In this case, I wasn’t satisfied with solder squids that were available to purchase2, and decided to make my own that checks off the items on my list.

While there are probably better squids on the market, this one meets my needs pretty well… and gives me something to talk about. If you want to build your own, I video-documented a slightly earlier iteration of it here, and the print files are available for download.

You could also probably just use a piece of unused Tupperware for the concrete, though you’d still need to figure out how to position the arms! -JC

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To appreciate “The Harbor2” one has to go in with the right expectations. No, their tools don’t live up to the quality Milwaukee or even more recent Ryobi implements, but sometimes low-price, low-to-medium quality is OK. E.g. 👉3

And sometimes quality has very little effect on performance — i.e. molded plastic from a lower-tier vendor is mostly as good as from anywhere else. Yes, Harbor Freight’ bins are awesome for the price, and they may be the #1 reason to go there. They may even come with a free flashlight if you have the app.4

Plunk your items in the little removable bins, take them out as needed. Then put them back in and repeat. The problem that you’ll eventually run into, however, is that sometimes these little bins don’t quite fit your use case. There is a solution!

3D-Print Harbor Freight case enhancements

With thousands (millions?) of these modular storage cases on the loose, and with a customer base that is largely compelled to build things, it should come as no surprise that people have come up with a plethora of 3D-printed bins to spruce up their storage.

Some of my favorite bins come from a creator who goes by armourcraft or Thingiverse. Strong and simple, these bins — in the standard HF formats + two different sizes — are excellent. For even more options, I modded two of them to add central dividers, along with another larbe, extra long version, all available here.5

With the ability to print more small bins than come with the cases, plus other custom sizes, these bins have become my go-to storage method for electronics and hardware (e.g. bolts/nuts). In fact, while I’ve been a fan of Akro-bins in the past for easy assembly picking, it’s hard to beat these bins as kits that can be stored away until they’re needed:

As far as I know, HF doesn’t actually sell bins individually, which I suppose is a business decision that may make sense for them. At the same time, I bet they could sell a lot of small bins sans case. Certainly there is a demand.

Other awesome bins

Yes, if I may be so bold, I have made some cool and useful bins. At the same time, one might argue that they’re boring and still rather generalized. Some have taken this concept and run much further with it. Examples below:

Millenium Falcon model storage: If you any models of this strangely-shaped spacecraft lying around, you too can store them in a Harbor Freight box. Actually, there are a LOT of Star Wars Harbor Freight bin models available, apparently for a tabletop X-Wing game that I’ve yet to play.

Bottle opener and mounting screws: Moving on the the practical, but still niche, if you install and/or repair bottle openers on a regular basis, this bin could be for you!

Kreg Jig: While I use my bins mostly for parts, there’s no reason why you couldn’t store small tools or implements. I have a similar jig that I keep in my workbench, but to each his own!

While these individual bins are probably not for you, I’d invite you to treat them as inspiration for developing your own niche holders to keep YOUR things organized. While cuboid-ish designs (+ labels via my Brother P-Touch label maker) work well for me, don’t be afraid to get creative!

More case benefits

Besides forming an organized and space-efficient way to store your parts, consider the other benefits of these cases:

• Portable and divisible6 - need to take your case somewhere else? Just grab the handle and go. Do you only need parts/implements from that one little bin? Take it out and set it where needed on your workbench.

• Secure against drops (maybe) - I wouldn’t test this necessarily, but if you drop a closed case, there’s at least a chance that it will stay closed and all your parts won’t spill onto the floor.

• See-through top - This is perhaps under-appreciated until you start using it, but it’s very nice to be able to get even a blurry view of what’s in the case before opening it up.

The big annoyance with HF bins (that I wish they’d fix)

As soon as you read this, some of you immediately knew exactly what I was talking about. Yes, even though these cases are covered in plastic, HF in their infinite wisdom insists on sticking advertising stickers on the cases themselves, which you have to tediously remove or just live with lowered visibility.

My solution is to douse it with goo remover Goof Off, wipe vigorously with whatever towel I can abscond with from our kitchen area, then repeat with isopropyl alcohol to finish the job. Or perhaps an additional dousing in isopropyl alcohol first. I still don’t have the procedure down to a science, but what I do know is these stickers seem like rather user-hostile behavior… that I’ll admittedly put up with if they don’t change it.

Bottom line: buy/mod some cases!

At the end of the day, these cases good/inexpensive/standardized enough to put up with the above annoyance. So I suppose if I’m still buying, HF doesn’t have much of a reason to change. Note that HF isn’t paying me for this post. I’m just an observer/customer.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Go buy some HF cases and print doo-dads for them if you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about the stickers!

And if you’re wondering about 3D-printed tool storage, see footnote7 -JC

Big thanks to our newest sponsor, SmallRun. I talked about them as an option on my recent Where to Sell post. Since then, I’ve had real, actual sales there on my JC Devices store and gotten paid for it. So be sure to check them out if you’re looking to sell or buy small run electro-mechanical things.

And if you’re looking for a good place to advertise your business, I’d love to add your name to the list!

Also, you may have noticed that I’ve missed a Wednesday or two recently. Between general summer stuff and other business that has kept me quite busy, my article queue has dwindled, and I’ve had to cut down on publishing a bit. Hopefully this biweekly-ish arrangement still gives you enough to read for the time being — I certainly enjoy writing here when I can!

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Addendum/Footnotes:

That said, things have not been good there recently, as linked in footnote 👉2. While I’m not closing up shop entirely at this point, I’m going to largely push other options (e.g. my JC Devices store on SmallRun).

If you have been thinking about selling your custom electro-maker goods, I have some decently informed opinions about where to sell them. Read on to find out how to make massive profits… and/or have fun and help offset your electronics addiction hobby:

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Below I list the three indie storefronts for your consideration (SmallRun, Lectrons, Tindie) in reverse-chronological order of when they were started, a la Twitter/blogs/etc. After that, there are some other ideas, including the really wild method of selling in person!

SmallRun.net

• Standard Features: List products, calculates import duties (VAT etc)

• Special: Import from multiple marketplaces, pre-order campaigns, Build Logs, Discord

• Fees: Free listing, 7% + $.40/order3

• Disbursement: Stripe, Wise, PayPal

• Ownership: Unigration, LLC dba SmallRun / Aron Hoekstra, USA

• My SmallRun store

As Aron put it when he invited me to list my products on SmallRun on May 24th, 2026:

We aim to be more than just a marketplace but give makers a place to share their build process & logs with users/buyers. Our platform has many shipping options, built-in labels, lots of customizations available for your listings, and you can import your product catalog from other marketplaces with one click. (More from Aron 👉4)

My first instinct was to trash the email as yet another offer from… whoever. However, after a bit of back-and-forth emailing, I decided that:

1. It’s nice he invited me and was responsive. A bit of the personal touch reminiscent of… ye olde indie electronics marketplace.

2. I could be among the first stores there, which would be really cool if the platform is successful. It’s still a fairly small group (if YOU want to get in on the ground floor), though I do recognize a few familiar names popping up!

I’ve yet to get any sales there (YOU can be the first) but given the low fees, personal touch, and US-basedness, I’m hoping this can become my “domestic hub.” In fact, I even set up my jcdevices.com domain to redirect to go to my SmallRun store, so feel free to try that out and let me know if it’s working.5

Lectronz.com

• Standard Features: List products, calculates import duties (VAT etc & IOSS)

• Special: Discord Community, Tindie import, pre-order campaigns

• Fees: Free listing, 5% commission + processing ~4%

• Disbursement: Stripe

• Ownership: OMLZO IKE, Greece / Alain Pannetrat

• My Lectronz Store

As outlined here, Lectronz was born out of the supply chain issues seen circa 2021, making it an established marketplace as of this writing in 2026. One challenge this Greek/Eurozone marketplace set out to meet was automated VAT/tax collection, and they handle IOSS.

According to Founder Alain Pannetrat:

I think the biggest reason to sell on Lectronz is that we build our platform specifically for independent hardware creators. That has shaped many of the features we’ve added, from pre-order campaigns to tax automation and IOSS support, and we continue to develop the platform directly from community feedback. (More from Alain 👉6)

As such, one might think of Lectronz as a European-focused entity. However, as shown below and explained in this article, new sellers since the Tindie-downtime-event in North America actually edge out out all other creatively amalgamated country zones below. As far as individual countries go, the US is #1, with the UK behind it (new) sellers-wise.

While I like dealing with a US-based company, it certainly makes sense to use a European marketplace for the relatively large number of orders that I get there. And if you’re not from the US, it probably makes even more sense.

I ship Tindie orders to Europe without taxes paid — with the requisite item value information on the label for the purchaser to take care of — but it seems that this can cause problems. I’d also have to assume it’s a bit of a pain for the end-user, whether it gets there or not.

So the solution here might be to use one marketplace for domestic orders and refer Eurozone orders to a marketplace that takes care of the VAT/taxes/IOSS for you, e.g. Lectronz. At the end of the day, the selling/disbursement process on my two sales7 was smooth, as was payment via Stripe. So, in practical terms, Lectronz being in the Eurozone seems to be fine for me as a US citizen and dweller.

Tindie.com

• Standard Features: List products

• Special: most well-known Indie electronics marketplace

• Fees: Free listing, 5% commission + processing ~ 4% + payout fee(?)

• Disbursement: Stripe, Wise

• Ownership: EETree LLC, a Washington State company / Gongyu Su8

• I have a Tindie store

As noted, I have a rather lengthy history with Tindie, but at this point they’re not my preferred sales channel. In my opinion — which is probably better informed than most — I suspect that the new owner(s) want to do the right thing, but probably got in over his/their heads. I don’t think it was handed it over in great shape, which is a shame.

At the same time, new-owner-Tindie wasn’t exactly at all forthcoming about what was going on at the time either 😕

On the other hand, I still get most of my sales there. Perhaps it still has the most clout between Tindie/Lectronz/SmallRun as far as the Internet is concerned broadly. Or maybe the many times I’ve linked there in the past is most of what drives my sales.

Frustratingly, they don’t have the easy one-button PayPal payout anymore, but that may not be entirely their fault.9 Plus, payout conditions seem to keep changing, which is… well, frustrating.

When asked why one should choose Tindie as a sales platform, they noted:

Tindie gives independent hardware creators a dedicated place to sell directly to a global audience that already understands and appreciates maker electronics. It allows creators to focus on building innovative products while reaching customers who may be difficult to find through general-purpose marketplaces.

Fair enough.

Crowdfunding, eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Your Site, In-person

While Lectrons/SmallRun are the broad focus of this article, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention other ways to sell your products. Some other ideas in quick list format:

• Crowdfunding - For whatever reason, it seems like Kickstarter et al get less attention today than than a few years ago. Maybe the newness has worn off, and/or enough people have been burned that there’s less excitement for hair-brained new ideas. Nonetheless, I have found some success there, making money on my JC Pro Macro II, and roughly breaking even on a set of PCB/transistor coaster. I elaborated on this some time ago on Tindie’s blog.

• eBay, Amazon, Etsy - I’ve done very little on any of these sites, but they do exist and are probably worthy of consideration. Such sites give you access to a much larger pool of potential customers (and competition) than Tindie-ish options.

• Your Site - Since you’re at least a somewhat technical person, if you’re selling your gizmos online, it shouldn’t be rocket science to set up website and collect payment, perhaps with a service like Shopify. While I don’t have a website storefront myself, I am quite familiar with Four Bit Industries and provide assemblies to Clickykeyboards.com. On the one hand, sales through those sites aren’t subject to the same kind of fees as Tindie et al, but one is also responsible for all marketing and site maintenance.

• In Person - If you have something neat to sell, especially in the time period before Christmas, you can often do quite well at a Maker Faire or other similar events. Several years ago, I was next to the Four Bit Industries booth at Maker Faire Orlando. There it appeared people were throwing money at Mr. Four Bits as fast as they could.10

So where should YOU sell?

TL;DR: if I was advising someone on where to sell, I’d rank the platforms:

1. Lectronz - Well run, years of history, good community

2. SmallRun - Scrappy startup, US-owned

3. Tindie - Over a decade of history, some problems

It saddens me to be largely off the Tindie bandwagon, because I considered the site not so much a place where I sold stuff, but more like a community. Knowing some of the staff personally helped, but I think it was (and maybe even is) easy to get plugged in there.

At this point I would be happy if sales on Lectronz and SmallRun picked significantly. Both seem to have have their plusses, and where you’re located and/or where you sell could also play a factor. I’m kind of rooting for SmallRun, and it’s where I’ve put the most time in developing my store recently. However, I ranked them as #2, largely because they’re still getting established.

I think there is room for more than one hacker marketplace, and that this sort of competition/multiple options is a good thing. And, since I really, really, really try to avoid being negative, Tindie is certainly the more established marketplace, even if their reputation has been tarnished recently. Maybe Tindie can one day be restored to its former glory. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

Spoiler: it’s currently non-functional.

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For context: My background is manufacturing automation. I’m better at the hardware portion of projects than dealing with software/firmware. Writing code is something that I’ve had to learn to a passable level out of necessity.

Claude Project Fixing Begins

March 6, 2026: I tried using Claude to fix an old clock project, using the web application and the Sonnet 4.6 model. While I had been told that Opus 4.6 was better for this purpose, Sonnet 4.6 was available sans payment, so that’s what got used. I had also been told that using something like Antigravity IDE, Claude Desktop, and/or Claude Code was better, but you have to start somewhere.1

Long story short (and again, see my previous post) Claude fixed (?) and enhanced my unused clock, using only its reduced Sonnet brainpower. Like most magical fixes in mythology there were a few tradeoffs, and few things that I found amazing. My initial thoughts are outlined below in glorious bullet point format, separated into good/bad/neutral-conclusion sections.

Claude is awesome (the good)

• Claude did a rather unbelievable job of understanding the context of my physical thing with relatively little input on my part beyond uploading the original code. There are 85 LEDs on this board, mapped out in a rather unintuitive way👇 to display numerical segments, colons, and a 9x3 matrix of square dots.

  

  I had always assumed that while AI could, for instance, make a spreadsheet or webpage, but it wouldn’t function well at the intersection of hardware and software (i.e. firmware).2 Claude had a few questions for me, but for the most part it simply understood how my device works.
  
  One caveat here is that I have made videos and at least one writeup on the clock that it could have (theoretically) used for a better understanding. The person that convinced me to finally try this (thx Jon) tried something similar with his long-neglected, and not as well-documented, robot and it still was able to make useful improvements, lending credibility to its below statement.

  

• Being able to code well may no longer be my limiting factor in hardware projects. As noted previously, I’m not a great programmer. However, I’d consider myself a competent mechanical designer, and pretty good with electronics (depending on the context).3 So if I have an idea for something that I could physically make, code is less of a barrier it once was.

• Generally speaking, AI likes to give me compliments and encourages me. I’m torn between whether this is good or kind of silly and/or detrimental. Probably a bit of both. It’s like putting a sticky note on your mirror to read every day that says “YOU’VE GOT THIS.” You know its not the result of another human’s opinion about you, but encouragement, from whatever source, can be helpful 💐
  
  OTOH, AI is trained on a large portion of the world’s knowledge. So one might argue that such compliments are from the WHOLE WORLD. I’ll put this in the good category, but you may want to turn the flattery off if you’re ego is fully satisfied.4

• It was able to implement some really great improvements I hadn’t attempted before, including:

  • Over-the-air programming (OTA): I don’t even have to plug it in to program it any more. I just click a few things and it sends new code via WiFi.

  • Programming script: Rather than opening the Arduino IDE, I have a menu with text-based options to modify how the clock displays.

    

  • The bottom matrix displays colors based on the circadian time of day, counting the hours down as pixels that fly off in a little animation when the hour changes.

Claude is sus’ on the bus (the bad)

• Claude thinks for just long enough for you to consider doing something new, then when you get into it, it’s done. Like you’re trying to have a conversation with someone on earth when you’re on the way to mars and there’s a 20-second light delay.
  
  One might put it in the positive category for those who want to justify scrolling social media at work, but overall this hurts productivity. To be fair, better/paid models may do a better job at this.

• Getting new code feels like pulling the lever of a slot machine at times. Ask for changes, let it think, replace the files, compile on the Arduino IDE or via a script, and it may work (jackpot). Or it may give you a combination of lemon, cherry, and/or orange that results in you being a tiny bit poorer.
  
  You’ve just gambled your time and/or monetary token, hoping for a good result. Did you win? Maybe. Could a competent programmer have won in the same amount of time? Also maybe.

• Claude can sometimes help with physical troubleshooting, but if there’s a hardware issue that requires a hardware fix, it may still try to fix it. I fixed a recent bug by adding a capacitor to stabilize the power supply to my ESP32. Claude tried to fix this with software, seemingly driving itself crazy in its effort to please me.5

• It’s tempting to give it my network name/password so it can just drop that into my code to upload it. With my Claude setup, I have to past in a “secrets.h” file into the folder from which everything is compiled and uploaded. Of course, you don’t have to do it this way.

Auto-brick your device with OpenAI (the sus’ continues)

I wrote most of this article soon after the previous Claude AI Rescue6 piece. However, before publication I found that the clock was missing a few minutes from time to time. Per a suggestion, I tried a terminal-based handle called OpenCode for further programming, which can access several paid and free models. Importantly, it allows allows access to your computer.

You don’t just type into it and upload/download stuff, it can manipulate files directly and get your computer to do things. So rather than using the aforementioned script with a downloaded file, I asked it to make some changes and just upload it over WiFi. And it did it. Like magic.

The not-magical part is that it did something it shouldn’t have and broke OTA on the device. So now I can’t fix it without plugging it in — like a caveman. A custom lighting fixture that I made years ago also stopped working correctly at roughly this time. Coincidence? I’m not sure, but it’s plausible it decided to reprogram that as well.

So, as of now, the device is sitting above and in front of my computer in roughly the same state as a few months ago. Maybe I’ll get back to it. Given how it’s developing, maybe AI will see this as a piece of cake at that point.

AI hardware programming: a blessing or a curse? (the neutral)

I suspect that a good programmer could have done a better job programming my clock, and perhaps even faster. I also think that a good programmer could have gotten better results out of an AI setup, as that person would understand the context and know what questions to ask.

I’ve seen some debate as to whether AI actually makes programmers more productive. While I’m not in a position to argue this point, perhaps that some of the more tactical IDE-based tools (i.e. a very advanced versions of autocomplete) are better options for firmware than just letting AI go wild an entire code base. At least for now.

Per the points above, I’m both amazed and concerned. Is today a time of fantastic opportunity, or will it destroy the job market and even the ability to think for oneself? Perhaps the safest bet is that it’s a bit of both. -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly-ish about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

2

Not like this guy: Was thinking like when a boat floats away from the dock, and you do the splits before falling in. But this works too. Image

How to learn guitar TL;DR: pick up a guitar up and play for a while. Repeat every day for two years. Now you know guitar.

As you might have guessed if you’ve been reading Tech Adjacent for a while, I started this journey by assembling a guitar kit from Amazon that was around $100, (electronics and all!) After hacking/playing this, and trying another very cheap assembled guitar, I actually think the DIY assembly route is a great place to start if you’re somewhat handy, and you’re not sure if you’ll continue with this art form.

It’s a Telecaster clone, which, one might call the OG2 electric guitar design. This means there is a LOT of reference material available. If you want to hack, fix, or even learn how to play one, there’s likely a YouTube video or other tutorial for what you want to do. Sort of the Arduino Uno of guitars… if that reference helps you. My progress is documented in this video, including upgrades/mods/hacks.

Musical project inspiration

So what kind of stuff does combining a (new/old) love for music with a lifetime of making things and engineering? Directly, this meant progressively more creative mods, including a fairly standard cutoff killswitch, a new mini-pedal board design, and finally, a dual-killswitch effect button setup that may be the first of its kind.

Indirectly, this likely helped inspire my previously featured auto tong drum machine. This meant diving into the world of MIDI, which led to me creating a MIDI/serial/I2C adapter for the Arduino Opta, a profitable little device in its own right! As explained in some detail here, consider what you have to invent to make a project work. Others may be interested too!

Crossover niches make riches… but not too many niches

Generally speaking, I think there’s great value to being able to combine things in a synergistic manner. Consider a engineer who’s technically competent and curious, and can write and speak decently well. Then you can/get/have to do whatever it is that I do. If you’re great with electronics and/or mechanics and music (and perhaps a bit eccentric), then you become Look Mum No computer or Wintergaten.

Or maybe you’re a restaurant owner that decides to put his programming (or prompting) skills to work to make a new ordering app that works better than whatever is out there right now. Or any number of skills/knowledge combinations that make things work better. Your invention could be quite profitable.

Of course if you pursue too many things, then perhaps your talents get spread too thin… and you end up building a Ping-Pong table out of OSB to maybe save a few dollars over just buying one to see if it can be done. That was a fun project, and a post for another day, but I probably won’t make any money with it directly!

I think there is some inherent value in being able to do a lot of things yourself, but I also don’t think that being overly broad in your pursuits is always the best way to make money. From a philosophical perspective though, is that always the point?

If I consider what would happen if I became a doctor, lawyer, professional basketball player, even an insurance agent, there is a good chance that I would make more money than I do now. At the same time, if I was too specialized at my job, I probably wouldn’t know how as many things worked or be able to make/repair things well.

That thought is terrifying to me. Even if I could pay for anything I wanted to be done, not being able to do it myself seems like a huge deficiency. And perhaps that’s just my perspective as an engineer, but I think there’s some logic to it as well. If society was to crumble, someone would then have to rebuild it. Or at least know how to fix the sink in a Mad Max future where cash is useless… and, well, maybe we don’t have clean water anyway. I could also build a still. -JC

That got dark fast. I thought it was supposed to be about learning the guitar? Well according to at least one of the Mad Max films, there are positions available for heavy metal guitarists and people that can work with cars, so I should at least be able to fit in.

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

There had to be a better way. I designed a float in an attempt to obtain more of this fatty fruit in the far future. Purchase/print info at end if you’re interesting in getting your own.

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Good, you’re still reading! My idea was to print some sort of net-like frame to suspend the seed at the right water level. However, to my pleasant surprise, a quick search for “avocado” on Printables revealed a wide range of options, including a very clever “boat” from Mikolas Zuza2.

His boat/float design suspends the avocado without any poking or prodding. And it rises and falls according to the water level to keep it at the perfect ~1/2 seed submerged position. Also, it splits in half, which is apparently good for extracting it after sufficient growth has occurred:

However, there were two things that I needed/wanted to address versus his design that I did try. First off, the seed was much smaller than what I had, leading to some scaling guestimation on my part and a couple prints that went unused. Still, the bottom portion was water-tight when printed in PETG on my Prusa Core One.

Secondly, while it seems the intent here is to grow avocados indoors, what if you want to put it outside where it will be subject to rain — and thus sinking? The open top just won’t work. One option would be to fill the top with spray foam as seen in this video, but if the bottom can be made water tight with PETG, why not seal off the top as well? Thus my new design:

This would work in a small tray as seen above, I suspect(ed) it could also work in a larger body of water, such as the small fountain we have on our front porch. I even added holes through the bottom keeper protrusions3 so it could be anchored to the bottom and fixed in place so that it doesn’t float off.

During the prototyping process, I nearly ran out out of Prusament clear PETG and ordered this black Creality PETG that was on sale for less than $12/kg. The prints really look nice in black, and have stayed water-tight.

General design lessons learned

1. When you have an idea for something, poke around to see if someone has tried the same thing. In this case, Zuza’s design helped me consider a better method of keeping an avocado seed partially hydrated… even if I just can’t help putting my own spin on things,.

2. It’s cool to share your design for others to use and be inspired. I certainly benefitted from Zuza’s work!

   

3. Put fillets/chamfers on ~everything. Not only does this look good, it helps with 3D printing and other manufacturing processes. Also, use section analysis to see what’s going on inside your parts. I’m ashamed to admit how long I went without this tool as an engineer:

4. Models look just a bit cooler if you add proper coloring and details — like the growing seed in the middle of this fixture. I used a green fabric texture for the leaves. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but presentation matters (if you have a tech adjacent newsletter)

Do YOU want an avocado raft?

Well I’m glad you asked. You have two options:

1. Buy it from me. These avocado seed-boat-floats are available for purchase on Tindie in one or two-packs. While they aren’t exactly cheap, they are a bargain compared to buying a printer just to make a couple. Alternatively, you might argue, they’re rather expensive if you have your own printer and are only factoring in the filament.

2. Download the STL file and print it yourself. Just make sure you’re set up to print with PETG or are prepared to do additional waterproofing. If you still feel like throwing some cash my way, this black Creality PETG filament has worked really well so far, and I supposedly get a small percentage of any purchase made with that link.

So that’s it for now. Perhaps I’ll do a followup in a year or so to outline how my plant is growing. -JC4

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Get in touch: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply if you’re reading this as an email!

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Addendum/Footnotes:

4

As an insta-update, I actually wrote the bulk of this post a few months ago. Since then, I’ve been extremely impressed with how watertight the rafts are. They seem to leak very little, if at all. PETG has become something of my go-to print material these days.

As for the avocados themselves, I’ve yet to have any positive results — with some admittedly rather haphazard care on my part. In fact, one split open and appeared to be a bit moldy after letting it float around in the fountain in front of my house.

While such a free-floating fountain arrangement might seem ideal, consider that you need to add some sort of chemicals to keep the water clean. Or let it get… not-clean, as seen below. Neither is exactly ideal for seed growth. I still think this could work, but the arrangement would need more than zero care, even if it auto-floats at the correct height.

I do wonder if anchoring it in a lake or pond would provide the right conditions for maintenance-free growth as the water kind of takes care of itself. I have yet to establish Avocado Island anywhere.

Awesome! Right?

While interesting items, judging by the fact that these are now listed on Leatherman’s Retired Products page, they were evidently a less-than-successful product. Read on for some ideas as to what might have happened, and how you can get a reasonable facsimile of the Tread at a… reasonable price today.

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An awesome tool… for $125?

When I first saw these devices advertised, I was enthralled with the idea that I could have a selection of useful implements constantly on my wrist, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Your wrist-tool can be customized based on the links you leave on or take out, with sections that act as:

• Hex keys

• Screwdrivers (phillips and flathead)

• Torx bits

• Glass breaker

• Cutting hook

• Pick/SIM card tool

• Bottle opener

And more! It’s a fantastic idea. However, this was a bit hard for me to swallow at something like $125. Not exactly an impulse buy at my vaguely defined income level…1

The Tread is conceived

So how did this wackily useful tool come about? According to this 2017 Leatherman article, the idea for the Tread was born out of a frustration with security at Disneyland Ben Rivera, their CEO at the time:

our president and CEO, Ben Rivera, was on a family trip to Disneyland. They were in line to go through security and he had a Leatherman Skeletool on him, which has a knife blade on it. He had it on the outside of his pocket and flipped it to the inside while he was in line. Security saw it and told him he couldn’t bring it into the park, considering it a weapon

The article continues on about the device’s construction. It’s generally quite favorable to the product, as one would expect given its publication on leatherman.com. I DO think this bit is a bit ironic from my 2026 perspective:

When Tread first launched two years ago, it broke the multi-tool industry. It was game changing and there was nothing like it on the market: the world’s first wearable multi-tool.

I’m not sure what “broke the multi-tool industry” was supposed to mean, but I rarely saw them, and now they’re not sold by Leatherman. Maybe “broke” is misapplied. I did reach out to Leatherman about why they retired this product, but there was no response.2

Knockoffs(?) are embarrassingly good - better even?

After discovering this tool, I did what any budget-minded person with an apparently laissez-faire and/or fungible view on intellectual property rights would do and went on AliExpress to see if I could find a knockoff. There I ordered not one, but TWO of these fancy techno-bracelets for a total of $61.09 from the prestigious Shop911952037 Store.

I fully expected something of medium-to-poor quality. However, while I haven’t examined one of these bracelets direct from Leatherman, what I received appears to be an actual Leatherman Tread bracelet in both the smaller LT version.

Why do I think this is the Leatherman bracelet? Besides what seems to be very good quality, “Leatherman” is actually stamped into the bracelets more than once. To help justify the purchase in my mind, I don’t think Leatherman was actually selling a black version at the time. They certainly aren’t now.

But is it actually a good tool?

As cool of a concept as this is — a set of tools literally around your wrist — there are some drawbacks. The screwdriver and other similar tools are going to be your most used implements. However, all of them are extremely short, as in virtually no shank whatsoever. If the hole is recessed, or if there are other protrusions nearby, you’re going to have a hard time.

OTOH, the big flathead screwdriver could be useful for prying or tightening certain things, e.g. camera equipment👆 And if you’re into opening bottles a lot, the bottle opener would certainly come in handy. However, for all but the most rudimentary fastener driving tasks, you’re going to want to reach for actual screwdrivers. Even something like a traditional Leatherman would be a big improvement, and you’re typically gaining a knife and pliers.

Ironically, when wrist-worn and inactive, the tools to stick out a bit, potentially getting stuck on things and/or causing damage. Plus, the standard version especially a bit heavy if you’re not used to it. Finally, you or others may assume that the thing on your wrist that looks like a watch will tell time, setting you up for disappointment when you look down and twist your wrist an attempt to obtain temporal information.

Maybe I could learn to live with it, or even install a clock face as a link. Neither has yet come to fruition.

To be fair, Leatherman did come out with the Tread Tempo, which HAS a watch face built in, but that seems like a dangerous situation for a watch. Also, no knife (though it does have a cutting slit) means that you can generally take it onto an airplane without getting hassled. Recent rather positive experience in this footnote 👉3

A neat concept, not a neat product?

Bottom line: Do I like my (knockoff) tool bracelet? Yes. Do I wear it a lot? No.

Was the Tread a good product for Leatherman? Apparently not. They no longer sell it. Presumably people didn’t want to pay $100+ for such device, especially when what appears to be an extremely good version (even better, one might argue, as I did’t see the LT version in black) is available directly from China for less than half that.

Since Leatherman didn’t answer my queries, I’m left wondering what happened. Was it simply too expensive and/or unpopular? Did Leatherman contract a manufacturer that simply sold these products to anyone even with an agreement in place, and/or did another entity rip the design off down to the Leatherman marking (creating competition)? Was some deal made to allow others to sell them after it was officially retired?

While Leatherman’s official answer wasn’t forthcoming, I did find this discussion about the Tread’s demise on Reddit, including the following comment from VesuvianRocket2:

I built these when I worked for Leatherman as a temp years ago. They were Garbage to put together and the fault rate on parts was TREMENDOUS. They were spending a ton of money reworking parts and rethreading every single component. They spent so much money trying to make these work and they just never did. It was a Bad Product, so they stopped making them. We built them for maybe 6 months. I was hired to help staff that line, so I went when they did.

I haven’t verified ‘Rocket’s claims, but this seems plausable. Cool ideas don’t always work out the way you want. I’ve certainly made my share of misses over the years. -JC

Techadjacent is where I share engineering ideas, builds, and practical tech analysis. Subscribe to get the next post in your inbox — published weekly👇

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Get in touch: hi@jeremyscook.com, leave a comment, or just reply if you’re reading this as an email!

Note: Some links may be affiliate

Addendum/Footnotes:

2

OK, there was an email response:

3

I recently took a trip with my family to see some friends in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, also visiting Glacier National Park. It was quite nice there, though when I stepped out of the airport in Tampa (near midnight) I was shocked at how humid it is. Apparently it’s always like that here; I’m just used to it.

Anyway, I took my Tread bracelet, along with a black Citizen watch that has a similar look. To the Tread’s credit, it came in handy in at least two situations. First, it allowed me to loosen a reflector on one of the bikes we were using in order to lower the seat. Its little cutting hook also allowed me to elegantly dispose of a clothing tag, rather than struggling with it and potentially ripping the fabric (as one does).

Waiting at the airport for our connecting return flight, I had switched to my traditional watch. However, I found myself missing it when my younger daughter rode on a moving sidewalk escalator thing over and over for entertainment. I pictured her hair getting sucked into the moving rail and thought it would be really nice to have some sort of cutting apparatus ready to go for such a situation. But that didn’t happen, and the Tread, in my carry-on luggage, was never questioned.

When I got home, I also tightened a bicycle seat down because it was handy. So maybe the Tread (knockoff) is more useful than I gave it credit for in the bulk of the article, which largely written before that journey.

While apparently profitable, custom keyboard controllers are more of a hobby/interest for Christoph than how he makes his living, and he generously offered to help me get started final-assembling them here in the USA. I ordered the board from China to his specs, where they attach surface-mount components on one side.2

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The other side’s thru-hole components, however, are more difficult to get China-assembled at relatively low volumes. Those bits are therefore soldered (literally) in-house, or in-garage to be specific. Assembling one or two of these devices with ad hoc holding setups (e.g. my solder squid) would be possible, but doing more requires a more efficient solution.

Besides preventing frustration, if I’m selling something, I want the assembly to be consistent. Randomly angled connectors is a literal and figurative bad look. So I did what I’ve been trained to do as a mechanical engineer and built a jig — i.e. a custom tool that helps with a specific job, or class of jobs, often holding something in place.

Notably, Christoph, the board’s originator, also made his own jig out of LEGO bricks. Apparently this worked well enough for him, though I believe he was attaching fewer components than I am.

Why 3D-printed jigs?

With all due respect to LEGO bricks, modern CAD tools + 3D-printing make building a customized assembly jig WAY easier than it was just a few years ago.

In this case, I exported the electrical board design as a STEP file (via KiCad), then imported it into Autodesk Fusion for the mechanical portion of the design.3 I then used the actual location of features on the 3D model to implement nooks and crannies on the jig where parts are held semi-securely while I solder them on.4

Less frustrating assembly, better results, what’s not to love? Well, there are a few caveats.

Tradeoffs for 3D-printed jigs

The position of jig cavities is dictated by the 3D model, and robotically produced by my 3D-printer, so placement will likely be correct (unless you make a careless error). Even so, there are some caveats to using 3D-printed jigs.

First, unless you’re using a rather exotic metal 3D printer, you’re limited to fairly soft, low-melting point materials. I’m using PETG, which withstands higher temperatures than standard PLA, but a soldering iron can still easily melt it. This was a problem with a metal blade component that sticks down and conducts a lot of heat during the soldering process. I had to leave more room here to avoid melting, and designed in surfaces that allow me to pry the board loose after processing.

Secondly, modification is more difficult. While taking off a bit of material in traditionally-machined metal jigs might mean throwing it on a milling machine or grinder, a plastic 3D-printed thing is more or less a what-you-see-is-what-you-get affair. If it’s not correct, toss it and reprint. Thus I’m on revision 55 of my jig, and each device was printed from scratch.

Finally, these jigs aren’t going to last forever. If you’re in a production environment where you’re going to make 100,000 of something, metal is probably the way to go. OTOH, with 3D-printing, a new one is just a matter of pressing a few buttons. You could rapid prototype a new jig idea via a 3D printer and then go with metal when you’re sure it’s correct, giving you the best of both worlds.

In this case, I’m not making 100,000 keyboard controllers. That’s a whole different game.

Another jig example

As originally outlined here, I made around 200 of my JC Pro Macro 2 devices to fulfill a Kickstarter campaign. I used the same sort of modeling techniques, and made several changes before settling on something that I thought was correct. I also used metal dowel pins on three corners to hold the board in place. It definitely made the assembly process much easier.

Of course, there’s some volume level where making a jig isn’t worth it. And if I just had to make one or two of either of these, manually fighting through might be the way to go. However, with the advent of 3D-printing and excellent design tools, the volume at which jigs make sense is much lower than it was just a few years ago.

A good project? A profitable project?

Considering expenses and startup costs, if I’ve make any money of this device, it hasn’t been much. However, it’s been a fun project, and as orders continue to ramp up, I hope this will become a steady, if moderate, source of income. You can buy them at ClickyKeyboards.com, which sells not just these controllers, but also the keyboards themselves and other accessories.

Besides a bit of techno-collaboration fun, it’s been a good learning experience. It’s also good material for Techadjacent.io! -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

2

Surface-mount components (AKA SMDs, surface-mount devices), don’t have any wires dangling off of them, and are (relatively) easy for a machine to assemble. The boards get selectively coated with solder paste, the components are placed… in place, and the whole board gets heated up for solder attachment.

Thru-hole devices (THD) have wires that have to be stuck through holes on circuit boards. THD leads shown below on the left, SMD on the right. Imagine how much harder THD would be for a robot. AFAIK, this is generally done by hand.

By the time we noticed it, another boat was already hooked up to the beached craft with a rope, ready to pull it out by a cleat attached to the bow. Our small party stayed clear, the rescue boat pulled at a slight angle, and — to our surprise — the stuck was successfully pulled out to sea.

Incidentally, the formerly-stuck boat had carelessly left itself anchored in the water offshore… Or was this careless? It may have actually been ingenious.

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I didn’t take pictures, but to put things visually, here’s the rough setup:

If the rescue boat (BoatR) was directly tied to the stuck boat (BoatS) and it pulled straight out, the total pulling force on BoatS would be equal to whatever force BoatR directly generated. However, if BoatR was instead tied to the anchor line looped through the cleat, the total force on BoatS could potentially be much greater. In fact, this pullout force could be nearly double what BoatR was outputting if the angle between the anchor and the boat line was near zero.

This is, in fact, a simple pulley system, as shown below👇

Looking a this another way, and simplified, BoatS would be represented by F2, while the anchor would be represented by the fixed F3, and BoatR by F1. F2 = F3 + F1, and since F3 = F1, F2 = 2 x F1.

Caveats

Of course, there is no free lunch. In order to increase force, the distance BoatS travels is cut ~in half as compared to BoatR when the force is doubled. Since work = force x distance, this preserves a sort of balance in nature, and no fissure in time-space is created. But distance isn’t really important here, since it should only take a few feet to get BoatS free.

More practically, there’s also the chance that the anchor would come loose, the cleat breaks, or the rope snaps. Also, the hull can certainly get scraped on the bottom, even if the boat is freed. so the real solution here is to not get your boat stuck in the first place. Also, it appeared that BoatR pulled at an angle, which may have helped torque and rotate the boat just a little bit to get it in motion.

It’s also very possible that BoatR just pulled it out, and that the anchor was not implemented as an ad hoc pulley. Either way, BoatS was freed, and everyone was presumably happy.

Don’t get stuck

What’s the lesson here? Well, first, don’t get stuck.2 Secondly, pulleys are awesome. This rabbit hole goes much deeper if you care to examine this further. Third, welcome to Florida. Perhaps this is a well-known technique among boaters, or perhaps there’s some reason its frowned upon. Either way, this is the first time I’ve seen it.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Finally, a big thanks to Techadjacent’s first sponsor, Seeed Studio. I’ve successfully used their products in the past, and have been happy with the results. If YOU would like to sponsor this publication, get in touch via one of the methods below! -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

2

Not that our party was entirely immune to this. As we returned to our pontoon boat under threat of an impending rain, the offshore anchor had released, and the shore anchor/current was torquing this boat in such a way that it was itself lightly beached. ~Five of us pushed the boat free. I ran and grabbed the anchor, dipped it in the water to get the bulk of the sand off, and scurried up the bow ladder as the boat was backing out. A little adventure/team building activity to finish our trip/birthday celebration.

Minutes later, we encountered another, much larger, boat in the water, but fairly near the shore. As we continued on our way, I noticed that way more of the hull was visible than it should have been, with unnatural gaps between the water and the sides. It appears they were badly beached. There was no way we were pulling them out.

Likely they were going to be stuck until the tide came in many hours later. We did observe a Sea Tow boat take off in that direction on our way in. Maybe they have some way to deal with that, but it seems unlikely.

Earlier this month, Fender sent cease-and-desist letters to other guitar builders, telling them to stop production of any Strat-shaped guitars and to recall and destroy such instruments. The targets range from a boutique builder in California to well-known brands including PRS.

First off, I don’t begrudge any person or company the right to defend its intellectual property. Whether you do so or not needs to be balanced with many factors. If you decide to go that route, you have my blessing1 to pursue your case promptly and effectively.

Fender already tried legal action on this front in the USA… and failed. Now the details are different, and I suspect they will largely fail again. Even if they were to be successful this time, I question whether it’s even worth defending from a monetary standpoint. More details to follow…

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The legal question

First off, I am not a lawyer, and I obviously don’t know everything about this case. That said, I’ll give my opinion anyway:

If you want to protect an industrial design, in the US you can do so via a Design Patent. Which lasts 15 years. The Stratocaster has been produced since 1954, so — for round numbers — let’s just say such a patent on the Stratocaster could have lasted until 1970. There was, in fact, a patent filed in 1954 on the guitar’s tremolo device (AKA whammy bar), though I was not able to find an actual patent on the functional, artistic body style. The older Telecaster was patented in 1951.

So neither patent would apply. Though, to be fair, I don’t think they’re concerned about the Telecaster. One might (somehow) argue for trademark protection, which could be in effect today, but since it’s been in use by a wide range of manufacturers with little legal pushback for decades, that would be a bit of a stretch…

However, stretch they did (already), and in 2009 Fender tried to claim trademark protection for the Stratocaster. Thankfully, and logically at that late (even then) date, this attempt was rejected. Now, 17 years later (per the same WSJ article):

earlier this year, the Regional Court of Düsseldorf in Germany ruled in favor of Fender in its copyright case against a Chinese musical instruments company, which never responded in court. The court issued a default judgment and said the Stratocaster was a copyrightable work of art.

So they’ve decided to use this as a basis to harass US-based makers of Stratocaster-clone guitars.2 Presumably, their end goal is to to sell more genuine Stratocasters and related merchandise, ultimately making more money for the company.

Knockoffs are actually GOOD for business?

When I first read the WSJ article, it saddened me a bit. Then I considered that I only play knockoff Telecasters. My purchases mean the joke is on them... Or is it? I then looked over toward my inexpensive kit Telecaster and realized that no, the joke is not on them whatsoever.

Next to my guitar is a genuine Fender Mustang LT25 amp that I purchased ~6 months ago for $168.99. Also, I replaced the cheapo pickups that came with the guitar with… Fender Tex-Mex pickups for $75.59 (nearly the price of the original kit). Fender has financially benefitted from my cheap entry into playing guitar ~2.5 years ago.

My purchases are only going to keep the lights on at Fender for a few seconds. However, multiply those by the thousands of guitar players who have spent way more money with Fender than I — and that got into the hobby via a cheap knockoff — and you have a significant amount of money. Knockoffs are big business for Fender, even if they don’t actually sell them.3

An illogical pursuit

Fender is spending money to pursue what seem to me to be rather frivolous legal avenues. AND they’re creating significant ill will among people who buy, use, and love (loved?) their products.

This means something to me because I play guitar. However, it should also mean something to anyone who designs and/or sells products. There’s nothing wrong with keeping a design proprietary and defending it when it makes sense. There’s also nothing wrong with making your designs open source.

However, at some point you can’t stuff the genie back into the bottle. If you try to do this too late or in an otherwise inappropriate manner, you get the worst of both worlds. I think it’s time for Fender to do a bit of introspection.

Whether you sell guitars, dev boards, 3D printers, or anything else, consider things from all angles before you pursue legal options. Again, I am not a lawyer… though if I was I suppose I would have a vested interest in promoting the legal route. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

If you’re into electronics, you’ve probably seen some variation of the image below. And if not, you need to:

Electronics deals with the flow of electrons, and the unit of electron flow (current) is the ampere, or amp for short. Electrical potential, measured in volts, pushes electrons through a conductor (e.g. a wire), while resistance, measured in ohms, restricts this movement.

The equation regulating electron flow is V = IR, voltage = current x resistance. Rearranged: current = voltage / resistance. Increase voltage and you get more current, increase resistance and you get less current. This is arguably the most fundamental concept in electrical engineering.2

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Resistance is implemented purposely in the form of resistors (the blue-ish things shown below) placed in a circuit to increase this value. The conductive medium also has a bit of built-in resistance for each unit of length that the electrons must travel.3

Fluid flow as an analogy for electronics

And since you’re still reading, you may have heard water used as an analogy for how electronics work. Here I’m going to turn that on its head and use that EE illustration to show a bit about how pneumatics works:

Ironically enough, even though my education is in Mechanical Engineering (not Electrical) I had to look this one up. The Hagen–Poiseuille equation (below) dictates flow in a circular pipe for an incompressible fluid. It’s a bit more complicated than the EE equivalent, but the basic concepts are there.

All things being equal, as pressure p increases, volumetric flow rate Q also increases. As the R or A terms increase (reducing resistance to flow), Q increases. My drawing is directionally correct, if imprecise.

As for why this is more complicated, it would seem to me that the flow equation is tackling things on a more granular level.4 Consider that electrical resistance is just R. For the incompressible fluid, the R equivalent factors in L, µ, and R/A, taking into account the actual shape of the transmission medium.

This assumes incompressible flow, which wouldn’t always be correct, but is probably close enough in many applications. It’s been a while since I took Fluid Dynamics. And while I did take a tech elective called Compressible Flow, the title of the class is about all I remember of that course.5

What about capacitance (& other)?

Capacitance, in electronics, is the ability to store a charge, and if you need capacitance in your circuit you add… one of more capacitors. They work really well for a number of jobs, including evening out the current input to microchips and allowing them to run better. So if your power supply varies a bit, your chip isn’t affected that much if things are designed correctly.

Similarly, if you have a machine that needs air power to run, you can put a small air tank on the machine itself, evening out air flow during times of high demand. You can also just coil up extra line to allow air to be stored there, sort of like how electrical wiring has a bit of capacitance itself.

You could probably push this thinking even further with inductors or other components somehow, but I don’t have a good example off the top of my head. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any ideas.

Engineering… it’s all the same?

If you’re familiar with my work from other publications, you might think that I’m an electrical engineer, or perhaps even a computer science person. In fact, my degree is in Mechanical Engineering, and besides a “Betty Crocker” EE course6 that I took in college, I don’t have that much formal education in the field.

That said, I’ve used relatively little of the nitty gritty details of what I learned in college as a Mechanical Engineering student. However, being able to think as an engineer, and the knowledge that I’ve faced some really, really hard mental challenges, means that I’m fairly confident tackling new and unknown technical things.

That might mean taking on something that an EE might have more background in. Or it could mean working on other pursuits that I have no idea how to do… yet. I know that I can do it. It’s just a matter of study and/or practice.7 -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

5

There was some extra credit question in that class that asked why ships often have a bump below the waterline on the bow. The answer I gave is that it changes the mach number of the water flowing over it somehow and makes ships more efficient. IIRC I only got partial credit, so I’m not sure that was entirely true. Here’s some more info if you’d like to research yourself.

And the plants are available for free after you eat the pineapple itself. Sort of like the adult version of the toy that used to come in your sugar-based cereal. Just chop the top off, let it dry for a bit, then plug it into the ground. If it actually produces more fruit, that’s just a bonus.

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Pineapple growth problems

The problem is that local deer like to test the young pineapples by yanking them out of the ground and/or the lawn workers blow them out via leaf blowers. Or maybe they wack them as if they were weeds, I’m not certain. What I needed was some sort of structure to protect the baby pineapples until they are firmly rooted in the ground.

And, yes, you might point toward chicken wire or other more traditional fencing. But that wouldn’t be much of a Techadjacent Novel Use Case (NUC) article.

I considered modeling something myself, but in this case a quick search of Printables yielded this Anti Pest Plant Cage. As designed, it’s much too small for my purposes, but scaling it up by a factor of 363.64 yielded a structure that would just barely fit on my Prusa Core One printer and is big enough to enclose a small pineapple.

I also scaled the stakes in a similar manner, but restricted the height to 150%. This gives them sufficient width, but also allows them to stick in the ground sufficiently.2 The cages do take a while to print, but it’s not like you have to watch the process. At this point, I have several protecting my pineapples. None of which have been destroyed or ejected from the ground.

Hexagonal trellis

I also found these 3D-printable modular trellis… ises, which are meant to stick together with some little connector pieces. While they seem to do the job, and look nice, I honestly wish I’d printed them a bit thicker as I’m not sure how well they will withstand the elements.

Some stakes would also be a welcome addition. All that said, the author was nice enough to make the Fusion 360 model file available, and used a rather permissive license for it (whether it matters or not, it’s still a nice gesture).

So it would be quite easy to change things around if I was so inclined. I gave the model a 5 star rating.3

Bonus: 1.5 gallon jug

I’ve been feeding my air condenser condensate water (as explained here) into a jug as of late so I can water other plants. However, I wanted a jug larger than a gallon, but it seems you usually have to pay for such a device. So instead of paying $5 or whatever, I ordered ~$18 worth of translucent filament and spent an hour or two modeling one that would fit my purposes. What a bargain!

Here are the files if you want one yourself.

3D-printing opens up unforeseen possibilities

While a 3D printer isn’t always the appropriate tool, if you need something simple and plastic, there’s a very good chance this device can produce it for you. And at this point it doesn’t even have to be that small. My Prusa Core One — with its 250×220×270mm build area — isn’t even a huge printer by today’s standards, but it’s still able to print something that looks like a medium-sized basket.

Granted, the pineapple enclosures take around 10 hours (the jug is similar, hexagons less), but that’s better than waiting on Amazon, or — gasp! — driving to the store. Since there were appropriate models available to download (and possibly scale) for the first two items, I didn’t even have to model it. And yes, 3D printers can also make toys and such, which I do use it for occaisionally. Mostly for my kids.

3D printing for gardening & more!

Ultimately, we’ll see what kind of pineapple and/or pepper yields I get in the upcoming seasons. If nothing else, pineapples are infinitely cost-effective. The peppers weren’t exactly expensive either -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

At least that is the case for for me personally.

In other words, I seem to have gone from a semi-predictable business income, to what seems to be more of a monetary drought and tsunami cycle.

Or, to put it visually:

More details to follow, along with ideas about how to deal with this natural self employment/small business pattern. TL;DR: keep selling yourself!

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End of 2025 / start of 2026: A good year in store! (???)

At the end of 2025, business was looking good. I’d completed a decently profitable year,1 and had semi-regular business arrangements with three customers, plus another that I was hoping would soon commit. Together these jobs would generate roughly enough income to sustain my current frugal-ish, family-of-five lifestyle.

I was also counting on intermittent work that I would find/do throughout the year so that I could afford luxuries like a functioning air conditioner (and free water?), eating out at places that tolerate children, and minivan repairs.

I wasn’t selling my services heavily. I was busy with actual work. That turned out to be a mistake.

Early-Mid 2026: Scrambling for Business

Fast-forward to a month or two into the year. Things had been average invoicing-wise, but by this time I generally expect customers to be coming out of their Christmas/holidays slump and for my business to be in full swing. For various reasons, 3/4 of the customers I was planning to work with dropped out of the picture early on.2 Interestingly, the one I wasn’t sure about committed during this period, so I wasn’t entirely unemployed.

Oh, and to top it all off, the platform hosting my JC Devices electronics store went down for quite a while. It’s not a huge chunk of my income, and they’re back up now, but it was a bit like adding insult to income injury to put it in mostly alliterative terms.

But you’re never actually unemployed as a small business owner. I had instead swapped roles from writer/engineer to head salesman. My first instinct was to contact my normal customers and other people that sometimes exchange money for my services. This is a good first step, but it also limits you somewhat as:

1. I only know so many people, and

2. I can only really keep track of so many people in my head

So, pushed to my normal limit, my twofold expanded plan of attack was:

• As I poked around on the Internet/Twitter/LinkedIn/et al, I noted interesting contacts and businesses on a spreadsheet, and added existing contacts there as well. I added columns with notes as well as the date of my last contact, auto-highlighting it to yellow to show that I should reach out after it had been X number of days.

• I contacted not only people that I knew, but sent out emails, messages, and even cold-called people that seemed like they might have some potential business. LinkedIn, which I’ve generally eschewed in times past, seems especially good for messaging businesspeople. Cold-calling is terrifying for me, but once I’m on the line I’m not too bad.3

• If there was a potential opportunity, I tried to take the chance to video chat with people. Whether new or old contacts, it’s a good way to remind clients that you’re human — and maybe come up with some new ideas on how you can work together.

While it took some work, things seem to be turning around. I can see potentially being very busy in the near future:

Mid 2026: potential payoff - tsunami inbound?

This morning, April 24th, I sent out two quotes, fulfilled an order for a set of keyboard controllers,4 and… turned down another job that just wasn’t a good fit. Ultimately, business success comes when the money hits your bank account, but this was still represented a rather encouraging set of milestones.

Interestingly, one big (potential) success came from me contacting someone I’d met and talked about working with years ago. While working together didn’t really… work out at the time, it just so happened that reaching out more recently opened some doors. Pretty neat.

Selling yourself/your business is a numbers game in some sense, but it’s not like playing the lottery. People are in all sorts of different states business-wise at any one time and you just have to catch the right person at the right time — and, ideally have built up a relationship and/or reputation to capitalize on this. Contact 100 people and you might catch 6 people at the right time. 4 might be a good fit for your business, and 2 might actually work out.

Of course, you then have to be able to do the work, in addition to the selling work that you just did. “What you do,” one might say.

Mitigating drought/tsunami cycle

While I can always do “what I do” (experiment, build, and create content around technology), if no one is paying me for it,5 am I actually doing any work? It’s a bit like asking if a tree falling in the forrest makes a sound if no one is around. I’d say the answer in both cases is yes, even if arguably matters less.

So as small business owners,6 we should always be selling. Even when it seems that we have enough business or even more business than you can handle by yourself. And if it comes to the point where you are constantly cash/work tsunami’d — first, congratulations — then perhaps it’s time to consider taking on contractors or employees to help with… whatever it is you do here.

Alternatively, you might consider paying someone to do marketing for you. At this point I have little to no experience hiring people or paying contractors. I will cross that bridge if I ever arrive at it.

Treat marketing work, reaching out, etc. not as slacking off or not working, but as legitimate part of your process. To this end, I’ve started keeping track of time I spend marketing — as I do with my paid projects — to help me justify that I have indeed done something productive if I’m reaching out (even if I’m not directly getting paid for it).

It’s an important attitude shift that I certainly need to work on. Maybe you do too.

$$$ tsunami/drought final thoughts

To finish out the article, a tsnumami of work/money is great. I think every businessperson’s goal should be to do work that is so excellent and valuable that clients are eager to throw money at you.7 Just make sure you’re charging enough —though that’s a whole different conversation.

Who knows what the future holds for Jeremy Cook Consulting LLC, but hopefully it will be closer to tsunami than drought most of the time going forward. I hope the same for you!

Now I just need to remember to keep selling even in the good times. -JC

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Addendum/Footnotes:

4

There is a bit of a story here, which I hope to post about in the future. The keyboard controllers were listed on that site here and here, and the initial batch quickly sold out. I’m making more for that customer currently.

You can also cut threads in 3D-printed parts. However, in this case there’s an even easier way to generate this feature: model it in your CAD software and let the printer make threads for you!

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Yes, you can just model and 3D print working threads on your part. I was skeptical, but for a recent project I modeled threaded holes in CAD (via Autodesk Fusion 360’s hole tool), then printed them on a Prusa Core One printer. They turned out great in my test of 1/8 and 1/4 inch pipe threads, along with M3 threads for — you guessed it — a metric 3mm diameter bolt:

This foray into printed threads was for the low (i.e. no) pressure drip irrigation setup,1 where I successfully printed 1/4 inch pipe threads for water distribution. It seemed to me that 1/8 inch pipe threads, much less the tiny threads of an M3 bolt would be too small to produce reliably. However, in this limited test — using PETG material — my printer just took care of this feature with no complaints.

Other 3DP threading options to consider

This post encourages setting aside, not throwing away, inserts, embedded nuts, and other techniques. Recognize that they aren’t the only option, but they can certainly be useful in many situations.

For example, you can use heat-set inserts with 3D-printed things for smooth, reliable threads. You can also integrate regular nuts into your print by leaving an opening in the side into which they can slide, or by pausing the print process so you can put it in place before being covered up by plastic.

And there are several other options which I could go over, and perhaps even test, but I would be far from the first to do so (and probably not the best either). My mission here is to tell YOU about 3D-printed threads, AND note that, after trying it myself, I’m ready to add it to my repertoire of techniques.

For a more thorough 3DP thread treatment, Thomas Sanladerer’s video below is a good resource, despite the rather clickbaity title/thumbnail:

To be clear, to generate 3DP threads I just generated normal tapped holes in Fusion 360 with the hole tool, then let my Core One go to work. Make sure to check Modeled,2 in Fusion, otherwise the threads won’t actually show up on your STL. Sanladerer’s self-forming lobed technique (shown in the video above) could be useful, especially if your printer is finicky, but it takes more time and/or finesse to model.

Limited data, limited applications?

I’ve only done used this technique so much, so at this point I wouldn’t trust it for anything particularly critical and/or subject to significant force. Most, if not all, available insert options would likely be smoother, stronger, and/or more reliable than printing threads in your thing.

But often printed threads are good enough. Engineering is all about tradeoffs. Consider where this would work well.3 Use as appropriate.

Thanks for reading. -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you follow along on this Techadjacent journey. Fair warning: I can and do get a little off-topic in the footnotes.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

3

Knowing is half the battle, as GI Joe said. Or, to put it in Mortal Kombat terms, there is no knowledge that is not power. It seems that in 80s and early 90s, such forms of entertainment had to justify their existence somehow. This apparently meant short educational blurbs interspersed among hours of violence.

Good times. FINISH HIM! 🥋👊