 I was having some trouble getting my Arduino working until I talked to a friend of mine who does IT for the Navy. Turns out that he really knows his ports. I'm a mechanical engineer, which pretty much means that it's my job to figure out and communicate how stuff should be made, and occasionally to make it myself. It's not just my job, it's also a hobby. I do a lot of personal projects in an increasingly crowded apartment, making stuff like nightstands and portal gun replicas and thunk shelves, just things that I make for fun. And it is a ton of fun, not just having cool stuff that I made myself, but just the process of taking some raw materials and turning them into something that I want, like an arc reactor, is an amazing rush. We live in a miraculous time of 3D printers and next day delivery, where it's ridiculously easy to get whatever materials and components you need to make whatever you can dream of for relatively cheap. Which is why it's really frustrating to me that so many people have great and interesting ideas for stuff that should exist that they just leave locked away in their heads forever. Tool use in shaping the environment is what has made Homo sapiens is such an amazingly successful and adaptive species, even though we don't have like claws or laser vision. One of the defining characteristics of what it means to be human is that if we ever wanted claws or laser vision, we damn well figure out how to make them. Not participating in that tradition seems like an awful waste of grey matter. There are, unfortunately, a bunch of misconceptions about what kind of person you need to be to take an idea and turn it into a real physical object. Let's look at a few of them. First, some people believe that they don't have the knack necessary to make anything cool. I've ranted about the Dweck effect before, how viewing intelligence is an innate trait rather than a learned skill impairs learning ability. But it's also very obvious to anybody who has any sort of mechanical ability that knowing how to build stuff isn't about being smart, it's about experience. Old and wise machinists don't know little tricks about how to make a thousand things because they were born in the lathe. They know because they've made a thousand things. Some people think that they'd need a ton of specialized tools in order to make anything. It is true that having the right tools can make almost any job trivial, but it's not like the civilization that produces those tools just sprung up around naturally occurring hardware stores. Simple hand tools have been responsible for some truly amazing work from the hieroglyphs on this Egyptian obelisk to this ancient clockwork writing machine which was assembled 400 years before the industrial revolution. One $30 Dremel tool would put a modern maker light years ahead of the people who made this stuff. Many people just don't know where to start on an idea that they've had and can't imagine that anybody would want to help them. Making is by its nature communal and cooperative and it happens to be full of people who love to teach new skills. Dropping a design problem in front of a bunch of makers on an internet forum or in a maker space is like throwing a porterhouse state to a pack of starving hyenas with leatherman tools. It's actually kind of scary. It used to be that getting in touch with the right people and acquiring the skillset you'd need to take on a certain project would require years of apprenticeship under a master, but today all of the information you could possibly need is right here. Just googling how to make and a project will more often than not yield a YouTube video or a forum post with at least a starting point if not step-by-step instructions. Finally, a lot of people think that even with help an idea that they've had is just too complicated to make themselves. It's very easy to feel intimidated when you're drowning in a sea of advertising bombarding you with claims about space age super sophisticated wonder tech that's supposedly too complex for any one person to understand. But in all honesty, they're lying. There is nothing that you can't figure out. A car might seem like an overwhelming amalgam of wires and screws and tubes and coils and vents. Just opening a hood with the intent to make an engine would give almost anybody a heart attack. But you don't have to understand everything all at the same time. If you get down into the guts of any device and look at each component individually, you'll start to get a sense for how it functions in the overall picture and eventually you'll understand how it all works together. The only things between you and holding that thing that you've always wanted is time and a little experimentation. For example, Lamborghini is one of the biggest names in supercars in the world today and it all started when Enzo Ferrari told a stubborn tractor manufacturer that he would just never understand sports cars. William Kunkwamba was living in an African village without electricity and heard that it was possible to harness wind power to get son. So he checked out some books from the library and then got some scrap metal and built a wind turbine that now powers his village. Like I said, these guys might have been smart but that wasn't what allowed them to build these amazing things. It was the body of experience that they gained just by deciding that they wanted to make something. Then tinkering things together and gradually accumulating skills as they went in order to make that happen. If you've got the gumption, there's literally no technology that you can't build for yourself. So ask yourself, what do you want and how can you start making it? Do you have any project ideas? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share and I'll see you next week.