Engineering build log · est. 2025
Grade 12 student building toward Electrical Engineering — one circuit, print, and PCB at a time.
I'm a Grade 12 student who learns by building. Every entry below started as a question — can I automate this? can I machine this? can I take this off the breadboard? — and ended as a working thing I could hold, test, and improve. My goal is to study Electrical Engineering at the top most University and keep turning ideas into reality.
Six builds in chronological order — from a breadboard prototype to a custom printed circuit board. Click any thumbnail to view it full size; entries marked ▶ play video.
A self-watering system that reads soil moisture and switches a pump through a relay only when the plant actually needs water. Prototyped on a breadboard with an Arduino, calibrated against real soil, and tested through full watering cycles on a live plant.
Next revision: solar power and Wi-Fi moisture logging.
A cheese grater bought from the shop was broke. So I modeled the frame from scratch in Onshape and produced on a 3D printer, with the handle, and housing designed to fit in the hand. An exercise in designing real moving parts — tolerances, clearances, and assembly.
A PIR-based motion detector built around an Arduino Uno that triggers an alert the moment movement enters its field of view. Wired and debugged on a breadboard, with the sensing logic written in Arduino C++ — the demo video shows it catching motion live.
A flashlight circuit taken beyond the breadboard: schematic captured and routed as a custom printed circuit board in PCB design software. A second layout combines a night light, a buzzer game, and electronic dice on one multi-function board.
I designed and assembled a walkie-talkie circuit by researching the required components, wiring, and connections, and then building the circuit from individual parts. Although the prototype did not function as expected, the project gave me valuable hands-on experience with electronic components, circuit assembly, wiring, and troubleshooting. Most importantly, I learned that engineering is not only about getting a design to work—it is also about testing, identifying problems, learning from failures, and improving the next iteration.
I designed and built a proximity-based warning system that continuously measures the distance between a sensor and nearby objects or people. I configured the distance thresholds directly on the microcontroller board so that when someone comes within 30 inches, the system begins beeping; as the person moves closer, the beeping becomes progressively faster, and at very close range, it produces a continuous warning tone. This project gave me hands-on experience with distance sensor configuration, microcontroller programming, circuit wiring, conditional logic, real-time sensor data, buzzer control, testing, and troubleshooting.