9V batteries sound and look like they should last long, but putting 6 1.5V batteries in series should last much longer. 9V batteries have a typical capacity of ~550 mAh, 1.5V batteries (even rechargeable ones) have a typical capacity of 2000~3000 mAh.
And I don't know much, so thank you.
Advantages: fairly cheap, rechargeable, and you can give PowerBanks to kids or whatever when finished or if you upgrade to something better. Maybe get kids to help!
> sorry if that's totally kiddie to you
Things are only kiddie if you think they are (personally I enjoy learning from children).
Worrying too much about what others think will hold you back from having fun! Enjoy the game programming!
That's one of the things I miss about "the old Internet". I remember when I first started using it around ~2000 to communicate with other electronics hobbyists, back when avrfreaks was big or just random people's widget shops has forums. There seemingly wasn't the level of toxicity that exists today. The first time I think I ever ran into someone being toxic (directly to me) was about 2009. IIRC they were saying that because I wasn't an EE I shouldn't be attempting to help people or something (I was halfway though high school at that point).
I’m not sure how to nurture my own inner child of discovery and protect it from the unconstructive bullies in the world, or my own negative inner voices. We all have to learn our own techniques, since they have to be personalised to our own personalities.
Anyway, good fortune on your own path of discovery, and thank you for publishing your journey. I do find it inspiring!
Not kiddie at all, AVR microcontrollers have been used commercially for ages and they have some properties that can be nice, e.g. they are fairly simple cores, they operate at 5V and their output pins can sink ~40mA, so you can easily e.g. drive a MOSFET gate.
The Arduino ecosystem is huge and it's great to get things up and running quickly.
One day, I'll do something about everything!
I'm only 28, but during the pandemic I decided to dust off my old electronics hobbies that fell by the wayside when the mobile app boom started.
Middle school and early high school me thought I was going into robotics, but the iPhone came out the year I started high school. When the App Store came out the following year, the smartphone revolution started, and about a year later I went all in on mobile apps and gaming for the rest of high school and my college years. Contract iOS and Unity3D work got me through college.
It's somewhat ironic, because I haven't written or worked on a single mobile app since I left college (nor have I owned an Apple device). I ended up taking all of the knowledge of embedded Linux systems I gained doing robotics and started doing esoteric high performance storage virtualization systems as the starting point of my career. Never saw that one coming.
I hadn't really done any serious hobby electronics in nearly a decade, but I've continued to lug all of the equipment around every time I move. So, I dusted off some old hardware and got hooked once again, only to find out that the AVR is old news and everyone is into ESP32 and ARM these days :)