junk repository

I've got too much junk at home lying around and waiting to rot...
this junk collecting business is a relic from my prehistoric days (see the article on 'my scientific prehistory') The idea was that you could have this huge repository of junk lying around, and when you wanted to make something exciting you could just look for the appropriate junk ingredients, disembowel and dissect to remove the required components, then mix and mash them into a new exotic creation. Instant gratification, instant realisation of some crazy idea. Doesn't need to be a groudbreaking work (although occasionally i thought i might have had one)...perhaps just a computer chassis fitted on a small inverted table with my bicycle wheels painstakingly bolted to the table with pieces of scrap metal and nuts and screws...mind you this creation is for real! I really did assemble it. But i couldn't find the appropriate motors (wish i stopped my dad when he took my little electric landrover that you ride in circles around the small confines of the porch after begging your parent to park somewhere else) I couldn't get them at sungei road either...

speaking of sungei road...that place is a heaven! at least for me...even better because its next to Sim Lim Tower (not Square) where i can get my electronic parts. There's so much junk there...you can even find a corner specially for old laptops! and the karang guni ah peks look so cool and knowledgeable when they play around with those relics of technology. I almost wanted to junk my present laptop and get a replacement from these guys. There's also a really old vacuum tube radio! i'd wanna get that! And there's boxes of CCTV cameras on sale...though its hard to determine if they still work.

i've been working on the circuit fabrication process again...this week i spent a whole night at camp thinking about refining the process. Its just picking up where i left off (??!! language doesn't sound right) two years ago. No...more than that. It first started in like secondary three i think? i had just learnt about the process by which printed circuit boards are made.
That's when i realised that PCBs aren't literally printed out from printers. Though i wish this could become a reality. Anyway, i was making circuits with chips and microcontrollers on them, and soldering them on a prototype board was challengine for me. A prototype board is a fiberglass board that's perforated with holes, and one side of it, the holes are encircled by copper. So you can insert a component on one side, and solder it to the board on the
other. You see that the problem this gives me, being the easily confused person that i am, is that when i make my connections, i have to insert the parts on one side and flip to the other to solder the wires, and this entails laterally inverting your mental picture of the circuit diagram, which means i routinely get confused between the two. And so i make lots of connection errors, and this means lots of debugging. Which is a waste of time and effort, and wears my patience real thin.

Hmm not in much of a mood to describe the detailed evolution of them process...suffice to say that till this day i remain extremely grateful to my RI Computer Science Club teacher-in-charge, Ms. Fong Lay Lean, who has since left the school. She gave me the freedom and latitude and permission to work in the chemistry lab. Even when she wasn't convinced of my idea. That alone is enough. That is one of the best gifts a teacher can give a student, in my
opinion...FREEDOM TO EXPLORE. The process has since gone through many iterations, and in its current form, is considerably cheaper, more environmentally friendly, easier for us home-
experimenters to use, more convenient...than the standard PCB fabrication process. But it still needs refinement, and its primary purpose is to make circuit prototyping easier for the home-experimenter...not as a replacement for the industrial method. Anyway i've been looking through the junk in my home for the materials i need to carry out my plan for the circuit fabrication process. I have a list of projects called 'enabling technologies'. The accomplishment of these projects will open up more possibilities...they will enable the realisation of a lot
more projects. They are an enabling factor. This process is one of them. Without it, i cannot do anything else.

hmm don't seem to be in a mood for writing...apologies to the reader for the absence of coherence and good writing in this piece. haiz...


Postscript:It was originally intended that this article be an exploration into the potential creations i could make from the junk i have in my house. This junk was accumulated as a result of past prehistoric creational fantasies and also projects that all died.

I was looking through my junk today for things i needed for the circuit fab process i talked abt above, and suddenly thought i should conceive some ideas so i could expend my current stock of junk...to make room for more junk when i go shopping at sungei road in the near future (hopefully)