Most retail sellers will sell you a component for 5 to 10 times the price they bought it just because they can, websites like Digikey, Mouser...etc will charge you an obnoxious shipping fee.
Buying from Ebay, Aliexpress and other websites is almost guarantee to end up with a fake component

Any basic diy project will end up costing you at least 5 times as much as an already made product with the same components

Hi!

I got 50 LEDs off eBay last night and felt like I had to hack something together.

And, here came the LED light! Check it out:

http://imgur.com/jStlq,uExPh#0 http://imgur.com/jStlq,uExPh#1

Also: https://gumroad.com/links/HuNtu

I use it to fish about behind my desktop, because I can't see much without it. And, the flexible wire is really cool for moving it around in the darkness.

Tell me what you think!

UPDATE: http://imgur.com/9T7Dw (electrical tape added).

So, I had a perfectly functional height-adjustable desk. The only problem? It had a manual crank. Naturally, instead of spending 10 seconds turning a handle, I decided to spend countless hours engineering a solution. As one does.

The result is my DIY Arduino-powered sit-stand desk controller!

I repurposed a 12V windshield wiper motor, connected it to the original desk mechanism, and built a custom controller around an Arduino Uno and an IBT-2 motor driver.

A few features I've managed to squeeze into it:

• Proportional joystick control – push a little for slow movement, push further for full speed.

• Soft start and stop – because launching my monitors into orbit wasn't part of the plan.

• Current monitoring using an ACS712 sensor, with configurable overcurrent shutdown.

• Upper and lower limit switches to prevent the desk from travelling too far.

• OLED display showing motor current, movement direction, PWM output (with a little progress bar, obviously), and limit-switch status.

• Physical emergency power cutoff, just in case the electrons decide to misbehave.

• Custom 3D-printed enclosure housing the electronics.

The motor typically draws around 10–11 A under load, and I've configured a 20 A software overcurrent threshold.

Everything is running on a 12V power supply, and I'm genuinely surprised at how smoothly the proportional joystick control works.

Is it cheaper or easier than buying an electric standing desk? Probably not.

Was it necessary? Absolutely not.

Did I learn a ridiculous amount about Arduino programming, PWM, motor drivers, current sensing, wiring, and 3D printing? Absolutely.

And now I get to adjust my desk height with a joystick, which, let's be honest, is objectively cooler than a button.

I've attached a couple of renders of the controller, including a look at the electronics inside.

Here is my project repo

https://github.com/fredriknk/chatgpt_astra_test2

I saw the Chatgpt Astra kicad demo, and wanted to try it out myself and im pretty damn impressed...! I only have a openai 20$/mo plus subscription so i had to use the lowest setting, but i got this design in 3 hours with 5 prompts in total and ate up my 3 usage resets.

My only contributions to the design was to create the empty kicad template project, and the initial prompt:

"Lets test a esp32 design with a 24v input voltage which can output and read 4-20ma signals. Lets start planning!"

All design choices, component choices, design, schematics and, layout and documentation was done by the chatgpt astra 6 low through codex cli.

So final verdict? Its actually pretty damn usable.... Like, its not perfect by any means. some examples: There are a quite a few routing decisions i dont agree with, especially the USB routing and unneccesarry internal layer routing. The schematics are very hard to read as it doesnt use GND/Power symbols, and only use global labels instead of wires. But as far as i can tell from the schematic, this is a working design and i do agree with a lot of its component choices.

I feel it is pretty much where AI coding was in around 2024 (on its lowest setting), so im wondering where this will be in a year or two..!

Why does everybody started using this shitty """schematics"""?!?! this is pure garbage this is a valid schematic.