Projects I have designed, built and tested, with the problems I hit along the way and how I solved them.
I am a student working towards a career in electrical engineering. I am most interested in the point where electronics, code and mechanical design meet, and I learn best by building something real and then finding out what is wrong with it.
Each project below sets out what I was trying to achieve, how I designed and built it, what went wrong, and what I changed. The full write-up for each one can be opened from its project section.
Objective: To design and build a working five-speed-plus-reverse H-pattern shifter for PC sim racing at a fraction of the cost of a commercial one, and to use the project to learn soldering and microcontroller programming.
Result: A plywood shifter with a wooden gimbal pivot and a balsa 5+R gate. Six microswitches are read by a Raspberry Pi Pico running CircuitPython, which appears to the PC as a USB game controller with one button per gear. It works in Assetto Corsa and Euro Truck Simulator 2 and cost about £20.
Key problem solved: The first 6+R gate jammed in the outer gates because my CAD design treated the panel as a flat shape and ignored the wood's thickness. A tilting lever needs more clearance through a thick panel, so I redesigned the gate as 5+R and cut it from thinner balsa, after which the lever moved freely in every gate.