A camera that snaps a GIF and ejects a cartridge that displays it
This is one of those projects that at first, is easy to dismiss as &quot;silly&quot; or &quot;useless&quot;. On the surface, sure. But looking at the imgur album and reading the comments (and I would imagine going to the website, etc - which I haven&#x27;t done), it becomes clear (and the author even says so on the album) that this project ultimately served a larger purpose:<p>From start to finish, this project has helped the person develop a complete (or nearly so) set of manufacturing skills. An idea was taken from concept, on through a multitude of other steps (design, prototyping, software development, hardware development, etc), to producing a final working &quot;product&quot;.<p>Now - it seems from the comments in the album that this isn&#x27;t the authors first go at such a project, but it may have been one of the most complex or largest they have done. Regardless of that, it has helped them to hone and develop a complete set of skills very few people have.<p>Heck - I would encourage the author to try turning this project, or something similar, into a MOOC in some manner; I don&#x27;t know if this is possible, or if it has been done before, but I bet there&#x27;s a growing audience of people who&#x27;d love an all-in-one course to study to gain such skills. Part of the problem of implementing such a thing as a MOOC is whether a person has access to the needed tools and equipment; maybe that could be part of any pre-req&#x27;s? Or, maybe people would pay for such a course, and parts or tools could be provided (kinda like those &quot;boxed recipe meals&quot; you can get)?<p>Ultimately, I liked seeing this project; even though to me it seemed &quot;frivolous&quot;, it really is a physical form of &quot;random play coding exercises&quot; software engineers do from time to time, in order to learn a new language or framework, or just to try out ideas or whatnot. Such a project thus becomes a education and learning opportunity of a very intense sort.<p>If this individual hasn&#x27;t gotten any job offers or such, I would seriously question &quot;why not?&quot; - they have shown a level of competence and follow through rarely seen in a single individual, and they should be considered a valuable asset to a company (that, or this person needs to create a startup or something).