> you must be using methodologies we could learn from
Not necessarily. You usually just need to know where to/what to buy.
e.g., someone on Reddit posted about being able to automate taking a photograph every time someone walked by. Turns out that I had an unused Raspberry Pi and a cheap webcam AND a passive-IR sensor. Half an hour of research into Linux command line webcam control and an hour later I had a proof of concept. Just lucked out that I have a well-stocked junk box.
But for most quick hardware things I'd turn to Arduino. I'm a professional embedded systems engineer. Arduino makes prototyping stuff that would have taken weeks or months just 10 years ago, doable in hours.
If for some reason, Arduino wasn't around, then I could use the "dev boards" that all microcontroller manufacturers provide to let you learn about their systems. Generally, they're below a $20 price point and come with enough I/O to do something useful and tooling is free.
I could probably go on, but there's enough stuff here to google if you're really interested :-)
Not necessarily. You usually just need to know where to/what to buy.
e.g., someone on Reddit posted about being able to automate taking a photograph every time someone walked by. Turns out that I had an unused Raspberry Pi and a cheap webcam AND a passive-IR sensor. Half an hour of research into Linux command line webcam control and an hour later I had a proof of concept. Just lucked out that I have a well-stocked junk box.
But for most quick hardware things I'd turn to Arduino. I'm a professional embedded systems engineer. Arduino makes prototyping stuff that would have taken weeks or months just 10 years ago, doable in hours.
If for some reason, Arduino wasn't around, then I could use the "dev boards" that all microcontroller manufacturers provide to let you learn about their systems. Generally, they're below a $20 price point and come with enough I/O to do something useful and tooling is free.
I could probably go on, but there's enough stuff here to google if you're really interested :-)