On 2013-05-18 12:46 AM, veegee wrote:
> 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
>=20
> 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.
>=20
>> 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
>=20
> AKA kids are getting stupider.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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

More uses randomly thought up:
* Line following robot.
* Make something that will open/close your windows to regulate room
temperature. Actually this one's been on my mind, didn't try it yet though.
* Make a truly automatic guitar tuner. Piano tuner if you're up to it.

Basically anything to do with XY motion, or robotic/automation, or
something you find annoying to do and would rather have a machine do it
for you.
--=20
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