Oh, our reason for doing the stuff we do that means we end up on this forum, is to do the stuff we find engaging enough to do without being paid.
I'm paid to write software and I'm lucky I do still enjoy it, but after 30-odd years of it, I mostly do need financial renumeration to motivate me to write code!
Electronics, eh, I can manage and don't mind, but it's always a bit of a chore.
It's the mechanical stuff and the creating parts from stock I'm really pulled in by.
You're a renaissance man and I admire that a lot (and am quite a bit jealous of that virtue in you
).
Anyway, it wasn't the implementing of a DIY ELS (and the implementation by anyone in particular) that made me smile; it was the apparent
disinterest by the DIY implementers (
particularly the OP), in the posts of those who posted about preexisting solutions (or the preexisting open source solutions).
Umm, you are making me blush a little. I think of myself as a generalist, with some grasp on the big picture, not a specialist. To be honest, I get paralyzed sometimes until I understand mostly what needs to be done. After that point things tend to go smoothly and quickly.
I was paid to do stuff (radar mostly) and I had to write code and full system simulations to validate system concepts before we committed to large scale programs. By necessity, I had to determine resultant performance - because that is how we would win jobs. To do that, an awful lot of software was written by a software hack (me). It did prove that things worked or not, which was good enough for those concerned. But those were all higher level languages and "easy" to pound out code if you understood all the concepts. My code was not beautiful, but it wasn't spaghetti either.
Since I had to support my code, I had to document it well enough that I could come back to it years later. Turns out that is difficult, as I learned from the school of hard knocks. We think we will remember stuff five or ten years later, but even in your prime, that's very hard. So my documentation got a lot better, since I couldn't blame anyone else for it. Can't tell you how much terribly documented and fielded code I've had to not only endure, but to fix.
An ELS appealed to me because it was multi disciplined. When I started, I had no idea on how to do any of it, from hardware, processor requirements, software, encoding, what's necessary to be successful to threading, nor even how to make mechanical parts that are guaranteed to fit on your lathe. But I broke it down into various smaller pieces and looked at a lot of things and slowly sorted things out. Can't say that my ELS was optimal, but it is functional and gets the job done. And that's good enough for me. Along the way I picked up a lot of skills, like 3D CAD, PCB design, 3D printing, got a little better at programming, and learned some interesting machining techniques.
DIY is a great way to expand your skills, but you do need to be task oriented, and not take on too many things, lest you deviate from your original task. I'll be the first to admit it is hard at times to know when NOT to do something. You have to know yourself, your basic abilities, and how quickly you pick up new things, to evaluate whether or not some endeavor will be worth it.
Sometimes, we just aren't suited for some tasks, and we just have to admit it, and come up with the best next plan. That could be buying a turnkey solution, or something premade or even a kit. As a group, we tend to be in the DIY camp, but there's no shame in deciding where to concentrate your DIY efforts. My two cents, for what ever it is worth.
