One of the things that drives me totally NUTS in my search for projects and source code that ACTUALLY WORKS, is it seems that not a lot of these posts, (for example, many I’ve found on Instructables) either aren’t proof read (i.e. poor grammar/translations) or they are completely out of date. I’ve seen many YouTube videos that purportedly are to teach you how to do some electronic project that are mostly just a waste of bandwidth; mostly just showing hands touching electronic parts and waving them around. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve found some useful but I definitely prefer just a plain “how-to-do-it” web page, a list of required parts, source code, etc. Now, a video showing the finished project. e.g., a robotic arm moving, LED’s blinking, and the like, could be useful, of course.
</rant-mode-on> On another note, I was at a local electronics store and I had a flashback to the plethora of such stores in the Seattle area when I was in my teens (read the 60’s). There were a great many local electronics stores like Active Electronics, Almac-Stroum, Hamilton-Avnet, Radar Electric, C&G in Tacoma, and so on. Before I could drive, I had to ask my dad if he could take me to C&G (we lived in Tacoma), and he was probably bored to death while I was looking at all the bins of really cool STUFF! There were also numerous electronic surplus stores with all kinds of goodies. Now these are very rare. Even electronics and science magazines that used to be plentiful are now gone. It’s really sad, I think. But I think now there’s a resurgence of “makers” that are on the web (Instructables.com, hackster.io, etc) and that’s great, but I think (as I mentioned above), many of them REALLY ought to proof-read their pages – there’s missing links, misspellings, grammar issues, etc. (Not that I’m perfect because I’m still new to WordPress, but some of these pages are REALLY hard to follow!). </rant-mode-off>