DFRobot Maker Friend Story——ProjectSbc

We invited our maker friend ProjectSbc to come and share the making story. 

 Click here to learn more maker stories. 

 Author: ProjectSbc 

Link: Youtube Channel

I always knew from a young age that technology and computers were my passion. My dad enjoyed building computers and built several during my younger childhood days. So even when I was young I was trying to absorb as much knowledge as I could from him. 

By the time I was in my early teens, I had become my family’s go to tech support person. Computer, network, electronic gadget, entertainment center devices I would take a stab at fixing it. It was around that time I had the opportunity to take Cisco’s Computer A+/Network N+ technician course, which I took and passed top of my class. 

At the end of the year, my teacher shook my hand and said proudly.

“You are going to go far in the field.” And... I didn’t. I left for college and returned with a degree in physics. 

Shortly after I got a job in manufacturing engineering. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the IT field. I still helped family, friends, and coworkers with computer problems. And my job had some opportunities to exercise my knowledge and passion of computers, but it never felt enough. 

I turned to YouTube to get my fix of reviews on the latest tech, or watch someone’s latest project. I dreamt up many projects. Back in 2016, I even posted a couple of videos of a project I tried: windows gaming tablet with removal controllers, that got a few thousand views (this was before the Nintendo switch was unveiled), but I never took it anywhere.

Watching hours of YouTube kept me entertained, but never fulfilled. And It took me awhile to distinguish the two. 

Around the time I received the LattePanda Alpha, I found two YouTubers that I thoroughly enjoyed watching: ETAPrime and Novaspirit Tech. I saw how making videos inspired them, which inspired me. That’s when Project-SBC was born.

I knew what my channel was going to be about: projects involving single board computers. What I didn’t have was the experience to design or the 3d printer to make it happen. So I bought Ender 3, learned to use tinkercad, and got straight to designing whatever idea floated into my mind. But there was one particular idea that stuck with me even before I started the channel. Computers like the raspberry pi and lattepanda are designed to be flexible used in many different applications. The one thing I didn’t see was the structure to make those transitions smooth and quickly. Couldn’t a modular case really bring out flexibility of these boards?

So I got to it. It was a slow and tedious process. I only had a few hours of experience designing on a simple CAD software. But I kept with it. Many early mornings and late evenings were put into this. It took 3 months, several iterations, and over a hundred hours of designing before it finally started to come together. When it did, it got featured on Liliputing and Hackaday. Some people even asked if I was a design engineer by career. 

Since i’ve started the channel, I’ve received wonderful feedback from other tech-minded people. These are some great people who I love to hear their ideas and see their passion for DIY tech. They will tell me some great idea they have… and that’s where it stops. And I think it might be because they don’t know how they will complete it or they haven’t been inspired to start.

If its one piece of advice I could give: its to follow through. Whether your idea works out or not, its what you learn along the way that matters. When I started I didn’t have the knowledge or experience to know how I was going to finish my project with what I knew. Not all of them worked out the way I would have hoped, but the knowledge I gained helped me improve.

Where do I see my channel going in the future? I hope I can continue to design the creative ideas that come to my mind, but at the same time I hope I can inspire others to start as well. I think I might start a discord group where I can interact with other passionate people to help them get started on their maker journey.