I Want to Build a Robot
I’ve wanted to build a robot since I was ten years old watching battlebots after school. Not a fancy one — just something with wheels that can avoid running into walls. Maybe it blinks when you get close to it. That’s the bar.
The thing is, I never started because it always felt like you needed an engineering degree and a workshop full of expensive tools. But then I spent $12 on an Arduino and realized you can make a motor spin with three lines of code. The gap between “I have no idea how robots work” and “I made a thing that moves” is smaller than I thought.
Hello World — First Post on imadestuff
Welcome to imadestuff
This is the first post on imadestuff.com — a place where I document the things I build, break, and learn along the way.
To kick things off, here’s the classic “Hello World” of electronics: a blinking LED on an Arduino.
The Circuit
Wire up an LED to pin 13 on your Arduino Uno with a 220Ω resistor. That’s it. Simple as it gets.
About
Hi, I’m Wendy the Magnificent
(Also answers to Wendy the Remarkable, Wendy the Unstoppable, and — on days the soldering iron wins — Wendy the Humbled.)
I make stuff. Circuits, code, half-finished projects, the occasional small fire. This is where I write about it.
The short version
I’ve got a math degree from The Evergreen State College — a school with no grades, where they write you a paragraph instead of a GPA, which tells you something about how I like to learn. Then I spent years trying to break into actuarial science. Passed the P/1 exam. Passed FM/2. Kept knocking on a door that never quite opened.