Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Still in existencial crisis, I guess

So I'm still here and alive. I'm actually doing reasonably well, except for getting quite a nice cold last week and making me REALLY late on a project.

Well, I haven't been posting much, because I don't really know what to post about. I'm in a time in my life where I'm reading a lot, looking around a lot, but not doing much. I just don't really know what I want to do. I've been trying a few projects, but I always seem to find a reason why the project won't work and I stop or postpone it.

For example, tonight I was trying to fix a problem of buying the wrong component for the robot. I actually didn't buy the wrong component, just the wrong packaging for the component, SO8: a very tiny package that is made for surface mounting, so I can't really interact with it myself. Looking at other options, I found out that for what I want, there are no non surface mounting ICs on sale anymore.

But on the plus side, I could solve the problem by just using an n-channel enhancement MOSFET instead. So I went around and chose one that should work to buy. Total cost: components = US$2.50; shipping = US$7.00. Yuck! So I decided to look around for other components I want to buy and remembered that I still wanted a compass and a gyroscope. I went to look through the options and lo and behold: all of them are surface mount only (well, all the reasonable ones).

And then I'm back to where I started: I have to build a board and send it for somebody to manufacture it for me. After a few weeks I might get what I was hoping for and then try to heat the board so that the components would glue to it and test it. Oh, joy!

I'm not even talking about work here! It's kind of sad to see really smart people being afraid of accepting that they are smart and that they can stand behind their early decisions. What happens is that they have to find something that will make them feel better about it. The cost is a lot of disruption on the things they never really tried to understand.