Colin Karpfinger who you might have seen in Wired recently (and on Hacked Gadgets before) wanted to inspire the current group of students at his old College, he told them how he started out in electronics and some of the stumbles along the way. He talks about his 555 timer project where he built a beeping countdown bomb simulation on a breadboard. Unfortunately the professor wasn’t very impressed. 🙂 He designed it into a product that he wanted to sell but component tolerances made the newly built circuit not work correctly. He was introduced to microcontrollers which is perfect for this type of task. He also talks about a project to improve mobile gaming that made it to the shelves of Best Buy.