On 2013-05-17 7:55 PM, IVP wrote:
> Some of those would require quite some engineering though which
> I guess would put the average student off. Probably why the shiny
> things are snapped up

And therein you have captured the essence of the visual basic coder who
thinks he's "good with computers" because he figured out how to pop up
an alert box in Internet Explorer.

> It seems to me that kids now don't do most things that we used to,
> mechanically speaking, because so much now is digital and, for want
> of a better term, pre-packaged with next to no mechanical hackability.
> Or it's so cheap if it breaks you just throw it away rather than
> repair

AKA kids are getting stupider.

An XY plotter and milling machine are excellent uses for stepper motors
and not out of reach for anyone willing to put some effort into it.

Other things: robotic arms, either driven directly or via hydraulics.
The motors can power precision pumps. Harvest piston/cylinder from cheap
air-pressure toy plane, etc. Done it before, quite fun.

But as you said, too much work. Much more work than typing
digitalWrite(13, HIGH) into a window and watching that damn Arduino turn
on an LED. Who needs to learn real engineering when you can become a
"leet hacker" by copy/pasting code to turn on a light?
--=20
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