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The only person that hasn't made a mistake is someone who hasn't done anything.

That is one of my favorite sayings, and I believe it to be very true. We all make mistakes. That is how we learn. You aren't stupid if you make a mistake. You learned something. Of course, that may not be true if you repeat the same mistake over and over again, but that is a different topic. Just be creative enough to come up with new mistakes and don't repeat old ones.

One of the things I have noticed on youTube is how quickly people are to criticize. If you put a video of your mistake on the web, there are people that are going to say that was stupid or I knew that was going to happen. Some may have known or maybe they just guessed, but they missed the point of putting the video online. It is so that others can learn, so in effect, people that have the courage to put their mistakes online are doing all of us a favor. Yes, even Jaimie makes the occasional mistake, but look at all the things he has learned to do by making them.

Offering suggestions before hand is fine, but when someone publishes their mistake, they are doing all of us a favor. Don't criticize them.

So, I might as well describe a few of my mistakes.

I once blew up a water treatment system. It was maybe 1.5 feet square and about 3 feet tall. I designed the electronics and control software that performed the water treatment and monitored the water quality.

This was an early prototype and the control board was wire wrapped, basically meaning it was highly susceptible to noise. I had been in the lab trying to work out a way to shield it from some of the high voltage components. I was doing a test run when a co-worker walked it. I asked them to watch it while I took a break. There was a blinking LED. I told them if the LED stopped blinking, cut the pump off. Well, this system was constructed with PVC piping and apparently they didn't cut the pump off quick enough. When I went back in there was PVC and water all over the place.

Lesson learned: Always watch your experiment yourself and always have a heartbeat LED on your control system so that you will know if it isn't functioning.

Later on with a more advanced version of the control system we had an issue where occasionally the processor would fail to start up. It rarely happened and we were working on a solution. A big presentation happened where my bosses boss was demoing this system. I was in the crowd watching. I saw him turn it on and immediately noticed that my heartbeat LED wasn't blinking. Knowing the result that was coming, I walk up in front of the crowded between them and my bosses boss. I bent down and picked up the power cable at the junction and unplugged it, looked at both ends, and plugged it back together. I then returned to the crowd. Sure enough, the processor started up this time and the presentation went on without any further interruptions. I don't even believe the crowd realized what I was doing.

Lesson learned: Cover your butt. The issue later turned out being a capacitor that was maintaining it's charge way too long. It didn't have a path to discharge so sometimes, when you timed the startup just wrong, the processor wouldn't start. We added a small resistor for the cap to discharge through and things were fine.

Plenty of failures to get success. Count it as learning to work around mistakes, and eventually you know all the mistakes possible and how to avoid them.

We building my strawbale home I made two big mistakes. I oriented my bales strings out instead of cut side out making the stucco really hard to key into the bales.

I also did a combination of earthen stucco base coat with lime stucco top coat, which would be fine in warm climates but the two materials expand and contract at different rates thermally and they debonded from each other.

Lessons:

cut ends out
consistant stucco components for every layer.

Failures are part of the territory! If we always got everything right we wouldn't learn anything. I hack/mod a lot of old consoles and believe me I've had more than enough failures to last me a life time, but I've learnt from most of them. If you watch the Superbus videos you'll notice countless of mistakes and things going wrong. We even made friends from some of the stuff we went through. The engine wouldn't work so an engineer who had seen the vid's came down and helped out. An hour later, no problem! And we'd learnt things and made a new friend. Priceless.

I once worked for an engineering department where we electrocuted ourselves so many times that we could tell you the voltage from the feel.

sjvsworldtour wrote:I once worked for an engineering department where we electrocuted ourselves so many times that we could tell you the voltage from the feel.

Hahaha now THAT's funny.

But yes, mistakes are a part of everyday life. If you never made a mistake you've never discovered anything.

erm, lets see...
had Orrion's co2 tank explode in my hands at Aylesbury 2010 while my dad was doing some work, he actually got the worst of it but was still pretty nasty for both of us.
Had pure evil fire its axe randomly whilst i was putting in a new receiver, turns out the RX battery gives it power even with the link removed (all sorted now) the axe arm hit me on the head rather than the axe head (luckily or it could have been much worse) got a nasty bruise and the doctors thought i had a concussion...again, but it wasn't as bad as that
numerous soldering iron burns
dropped a gear motor in ice water we had in our garden and didn't notice, came back when it had began to thaw out and the gear motor was in there frozen solid like a fossil in amber took it out and it ran ok!
i once vacuum formed a hand mold...the wrong way
had a crusher featherweight that crushed through a PCU...and then the floor of the workshop, needed to pull up the board to get it out and then replace it with a new one after...lol
once drilled through my index finger
had a disk that flew off and embedded itself 3 inches in the door
once broke my other index finger whilst hammering
cut of half my fingernail with a dremel
had a spinner once that randomly span up and i tried to stop the silly dog we have from running right into it and it cut into my hand (the spinner not the dog, although that hurts too) still have the scar...
my friend cut half the way through his finger whilst using an angle grinder

the usual bumps and scrapes

You'd think i was incompetent
Funny thing is i don't mind, i like this spobby too much! and its opened me up to a whole new group of people (Knux, Jaimie etc)

Jack

Just had a moment, I'm one of these guys who likes to throw millions of ideas at a wall and see which ones stick. 90% of the time I talk pure crazy and people look at me funny but just now I explained to someone how its possible they could make a Rorshach mask with working Ink and they took the idea and developed it. Its these successes, these gems in the rough that make it all worth it in the end. I can't wait to see the finished project.

Oh and Jack? Remind me to put bubblewrap around all my tools if you ever visit =P J/k bro! I'm surprised you haven't lost a finger or something! Stay safe man... Please? =P

Edit: Also your tagline is awesome, and so true! =P

we got together over the 4th of July weekend to launch a pair of High Altitude Balloons. We waited until around noon to launch the first one, and it was *hot*. Like 104oF in the sun. Ground winds were strong, probably around 10mph, gusting to 15 or 20.

Our payload was slightly over the recommended free lift specification for the balloon, and we did not consider the gas effect at higher temperature on the buoyancy of the balloon. PV=nRT is important.

The balloon lifted about 20 feet, crashed on the other side of the barbed wire fence, lifted about 100 feet, crashed again a few thousand feet down range, dragged across a field, and lifted just high enough to get caught in an overhead power line. The nearest farm house belonged to the county Sheriff's office Detective, a forgiving, if unamused man. The Co-Op had to come out with a cherry picker to pull our payload off the power line. And worst of all, the video camera broke off its mounting while being pulled across the field, so we only got a few seconds of interesting footage.

We learned a lot of things that afternoon that went into making the second launch much more successful.