- I play beat saber.
- watch TV
- draw
- play video games
- crochet
- build robots
- organize
- compose music on the piano
Whatever I can focus on, it helps me release the day
You build robots?! That’s fucking sick! What have you built and how did you get into that hobby!
If you don’t mind a long-ish story:
I have always wanted to get into it. My dad was an RF engineer, but he never would teach me anything.
I moved to Seattle in 2010 (I was about 25yo) and I learned about maker spaces.
Well a guy at that maker space didn’t mind showing me the basics. So he taught me briefly how solder works and then asked what I wanted to make. I said, “I want things to light up”
So he gave me a breadboard, LEDs, resistors, wire and a battery and said, “Figure it out”. Pretty quick I got them lit up. So I went back to him and said, “I want them to change brightness when its dark or light out.”
So he gave me a photo resistor (when there is no light it slows/stops the current of electricity), and he said, “Figure it out”. So I learned how to use the photo resistor to make the lights brighter when the ambient light was brighter. Then I told him, “I want them to light up when it’s dark out, not light”.
So he gave me a transistor and said, “Figure it out”. This took me 3 months, all alone, to read the schematic of that transistor. But EVENTUALLY I got it working.
Since then I have learned to create my own PCB’s, programmed line followers and have built robots that move around and do image recognition!
I haven’t done much as of late but I want to get back to that! (I have moved a lot in my life so the second to last move I did, I had to donate ALL my robotics so I am starting from scratch)
I would look up maker spaces in your area. You can use them to do more than just robotics. The one I went to also had engravers, 3D printers, and knitting machines (or crochet? can’t remember)
That’s awesome. But the part that your dad was an RF engineer but never took the time to teach you makes me sad. My dad is an elec tech and some of my fondest memories are of him teaching me electronics.
I guess the take away is if you have kids make sure to take the opportunity to teach them things you’re passionate about! (As long as they show interest of course)
Heyo, don’t skip on crocheting. I got into it for a bit and really enjoyed it. Only got distracted by other hobbies.
It used to be catch up on Reddit. Now it’s catch up on Lemmy
I usually go for a walk, helps me clear my mind
Run.
It absolutley sucks at the time and can be a bit demoralising depending on your climate, but it’s nice to catch up on some podcasts or albums when it’s just you vs the stopwatch and nobody else.
It feels great when you’re done too - even if you’ve got a list of things to do as long as your arm, it feels good that you’ve ticked something off and it’s done you some good too.
Without getting too gatekeeper-y either, I don’t mean run in it’s purest sense - I mean getting out there putting one foot in front of the other with the heart rate up - jogging, sprinting, whatever. I’m a 10min/mile goon - I ain’t setting the world on fire with that pace but it makes me feel like I’ve put a shift in after six and a quarter miles.
Dude I like running too but I can’t for the life of me run on a treadmill or circular track or anything repetitive like that. It has to be some kind of trail. But the summers here suuuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkk it’s so fucking hot I can’t imagine running at all!
I have a lot of personal projects, some big, some little. Some focus around my daily job and the things I find interesting but are too farfetched or risky in an R&D sense to actually focus on. Others are more personal or related to my hobbies.
For example, I have a water level sensor in my RV that’s broken, mostly because of bad design. As a personal project I’m designing a drop-in replacement that’s (hopefully) more reliable.
Other times I make contributions to open source projects that I use and like, for example to fix bugs or add features that I want.
These are mostly evening activities though, during the day it’s mostly hobbies, like diving, hiking, motorcycling and such. You can never have too many hobbies :)
And sometimes I don’t have the energy for any of it and just sit and read Lemmy or watch a movie with my fiancé, all mood dependent.
