On: I designed a cube that balances itself on a corner

[caymanjim]

Hah! This is me. I bought an Arduino and a ton of components and I pretty much stalled out at blinking LED. I also watched all of Ben Eater's YouTube videos on building an 8-bit computer from simple ICs and then bought all the parts to do it and never put it together. I realized that I'd already learned how it worked from the videos, and putting it together would just be rote work that I already knew the outcome of. I tried to think of some practical reason to do it, or some modifications I might make, but then I moved and never unpacked the stuff.

[bombcar → caymanjim]

The most powerful thing for me was making sure that I had the relays/etc necessary to safely control 120v circuits.

Then you can make something that can turn off or on "real things" and work from there.

If it can do 120v, it can usually to 12v, and that's the next step - directly controlling components.

[zackbloom → caymanjim]

What you're forgetting is it absolutely would not work when you first put it together. You would then begin a journey of debugging which would teach you a lot more than any YouTube video ever could.