have i entered.. my dr. stone era?

over the past few days where i have been trying to remember all the things that brought me joy in life, i came across some old pictures of my electronics projects in high school.

to give you some context, my school was very traditional in where all the courses are the default biology-physics-chemistry combo. one day they decided to spice things up and introduced ✨electives✨.

most of the electives, honestly, were not the most interesting for me: french? german?? and some random business courses. to be fair, taking business classes is not a bad idea, that is, if i manage to stay awake during them!

however, one of the most interesting electives was an electronics course. mind you, that was probably the first (and only) hands-on subject in all of the school. you can imagine the amount of students that desperately wanted to escape the books to play with some wires.

at that time, i had not decided or cared about what i wanted to study in my undergrad. i just signed up for the classes that were the most interesting for me, which were pretty much all the STEM courses. electronics came at the cost of physics though so i had to skip that!

at the start of the course, they gave us a toolbox full of the basic components you might need to get started on electronics. these components included an mcu (arduino uno), breadboard, bunch of wires and resistors, some leds and buttons, and i think they even gave us an lcd screen!

i say i think because as you can imagine i got super excited and ordered parts of my own with the little allowance i had. i remember buying a very cheap soldering iron despite the fact that we did not need it for wiring as we had the breadboard. but i think one of the electrical components needed fixing and i wanted to play around with it.

i can only remember two “big” projects i made, which was the self-watering system and the smart house system. the self-watering one was basically a moisture sensor dug in the soil to let you know when you needed to water the plant. the smart home one was leds stuck to a doll house that you can turn on and off through voice commands sent through your phone.

after graduating, i had started a controller project but i think the hype died when the parts took too long to arrive (or never did?) and i got busy with entrance exams anyways. since i had not taken physics on my last year, i had a lot to catch up on! i also came to realize that the theory part of these electronics was something that i was terribly bad at and i have no idea how i passed the courses during my undergrad.

in the process of trying to reclaim the wasted time on social media, i rediscovered my love for learning new things and challenging myself on topics that i struggle with. that being said, i still do not have the same patience with myself that i did before, and im working on improving that. and so, i have decided to tackle the titan that stands before me:

no it is not my slime 受付 (thats his name) but rather the subject of the topic that most terrified me! i am exaggerating but i do remember feeling like no matter what i did, i could not grasp the theory. and this time, if i wanted to get to the tinkering part of electronics, i have to go through this book first! thats my challenge for myself, and i will try my best to tackle it! wish me luck<3