If I told you, I'd have to kill you and I like you, so I can't tell you. LOL. I worked in Information Technology for about 20 years and have always been moderately into tweaking with computers and electronics. I used to solder my own boards together back in the day for little projects. Today with the advent of China (kidding) and Amazon, you can buy things cheaply which can do a lot of things. I had never worked with cycle timers, so I thought this would be a fun project to learn. However, as a little kid, I was the one who was like 6 years old with a toolbox. I was fixing the kid's bikes who were about twice my age at times. I reroofed my mom's house (removal, dry rot repair, fascia boards and sheathing) when I was 18 years old and working full time. I've build entire garage structures, to doing wiring, refrigeration, BBQ, welding/fabrication, rebuilding cars and then have my nerd day job where I pound away on the keyboard. I've always been very mechanically included and my skillset leans towards being a problem-solver/troubleshooter. When people would toss away their broken VCR back in the late 80's or early 90's, I was the kid who'd take it and fix it. When I'd buy broken things from the auction, I'd normally always make them work again. Where some people are phenomenal at math for example, I'm not. However, when it comes to working through a problem, not being afraid to experiment and wanting to share knowledge, that's me. Heck, I don't even have a degree. So there, that's a bit more about me than I'd normally share, but it's motivating to me when people take interest in things that I do. Being largely self taught, raised by a single mother with no siblings, that independence likely contributed to my can-do attitude. I didn't have many others around to help me out. Then when I started making good money in IT, I used it to buy my house and then buy way too many toys/tools/geek stuff, so I normally only need to walk to a room or the garage to get what I need. If I don't have it, I'll usually just buy it. LOL.
If you want a fun fact that I feel silly mentioning, but I'm sure some of you recall a TV show called American Chopper. When that show debuted in the early 2000's, I was fascinated by fabrication. I had never welding a thing. I ended up spending about $25k on equipment and later on actually leased a commercial space to put all of my equipment in. All because of that show. I loved the concept is creating something from basically nothing or raw materials. That led to me building my own CNC plasma table in 2010, which gave me a lot more capability in my home shop:
During the build, I attracted the attention of a representative of Hypertherm (they build plasma cutting equipment) and they actually CNC cut some parts, like for the caster plate you see in the picture above and send them to me at no cost. Fabrication is one of my favorite things to do, but the plasma table was a lot of fun because I combined welding with electronics.
One project I tackled was building a CNC plate scriber with a pneumatic scribe. It ended up working great and I was pretty proud of myself with that one:
In the photos above, you can see how the plate was CNC cut, but scribed first. That's 16GA CR steel sheet. I'm strongly considering producing video content, but the problem is I'm a single guy and recording/editing solo, is a daunting task. That's been my main reason for not doing it. Anyhow, you asked so I thought I'd share.
Thank you sir!