Squirrel

“Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do.”-Neil deGrasse Tyson

Keep Going

When the going gets tough on a project is it okay to hop around to another project?

This is a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the years. Depending on how I feel about the project, and myself, at any given time answers have ranged from, “Absolutely not. How flighty can you be? You just need to buckle down and get it done.” to, “Yeah, it’s fine. I’ll get back to it. I just need a bit of a break to generate new ideas.

”While I think both answers have their place, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with either, or with the whole concept of “giving up” on a project, or being distracted by new ideas that flit through my brain and pull me away from the end goal.

Yet, I’ve been doing the creating, inventing, developing thing for long enough to know it's inevitable I will get frustrated or distracted or intrigued by a new idea that darts into my brain like one of the hyper squirrels that dash about in our yard. And then I’ll spend varying lengths of time pursuing that new idea, playing with a new concept, tinkering with another project, or just playing in general.

The trick is going back, and then going back again and again until the project is finished in some satisfying way.

Where Are we With That?

So, the Planer 17 camera system is tricky, and I find myself either not enthused, or wanting to jump around from one way of solving the problem to another.

I’m using an OpenMV camera right now, which is a really interesting computer vision camera, but it's not a typical camera and it’s not designed to get images into a computer. It’s designed to do computer vision within the camera itself and then send the results to a computer. Finding blobs, or tracking eyes, or tracing lines, things like that.

The IDE OpenMV developed, which is amazing - this whole system is amazing - does let you transfer images at a very high rate. (I should find out more about how it does that and see how I can use it as more of a general purpose camera.) However, it isn’t very easy and that makes me think I should use more of a traditional camera, or I should use a small, cheap camera attached to a Raspberry Pi - and maybe the RP could do all of the processing or could proxy the image data into a PC in whatever form I want.

I find myself jumping around on which would be best and it’s hard not to start tinkering with a regular camera, and a Raspberry Pi. Since I need to use a camera system on another project in the planning stages, and I’m thinking of using a more traditional camera on that - at least for the high-cost prototype - it might be a two-birds-one-stone thing for me to solve this camera problem with a solution that will work with both. I’m not sure if I should do more experiments and find the solution for the OpenMV camera or leap to a traditional camera now, or try to find another solution entirely.

But then, in the midst of all this wondering, experimenting, and deciding to prototype or not, I have ideas like, what if I made a super large-scale ballpoint pen just because I want to take a break from all these “serious” projects, and it would be fun to build it, and draw with it.

Or I get a silly idea standing in line at Target buying tea and spend days drawing ridiculous, punny tea bags. A totally pointless, entertaining, waste of time I’ve taken to calling my Creativitea Collection.

Or I take a break to mount a new battery pack on my electric bike because that seems like more fun than taking a step back, or a frustrating, potentially unproductive side trip on the Planner 17 project.

Where Was I?

In the past, I’ve been doggedly determined to complete whatever project I was working on, even very complex projects like in the ioBloc, and have gone for literally years not allowing myself to be distracted by anything else.

It was amazing because I was able to do a lot of work in a relatively short time and ioBloc was a cool concept, but ultimately it was never released or shared. So, ioBloc got done and it was awesome, and it sat gathering dust. And all the other things I wanted to do, other ideas I had along the way, didn’t get done and, in retrospect, that time spent on ioBloc seemed a bit of a waste. I mean, I did learn a lot about building micro controllers and single-wire, multi-drop communications protocols in assembly language...so, not a total waste of time. But, still.

If I want to get on this faster release schedule for “Simon’s Inventions” wouldn’t it be cool to just prototype this quick thing - not worry about getting it perfect or worrying about long-term utility - and release a short article with downloadable CAD files and a bill of materials so people could get the parts and make their own.

I’d love to do that much more frequently, but it would require a lot more time chasing squirrels and a lot less time working on core projects.

Distraction or Creation?

Maybe I can do the thinking in my head and solve the problem with the OpenMV camera without needing to build a separate prototype.

Maybe taking a side trip on something useless and creative, or working on a different project all together, will give me the time and headspace to find the answer anyway, instead of staying stuck on that one thing and feeling unproductive. Or maybe I should have just used a regular camera in the first place? Or maybe I should’ve gone the Raspberry Pi route, and now I’m thinking that maybe the Raspberry Pi will be the central processing unit anyway and all the rest of this conjecture is moot. And around in a circle...

But that’s the sort of thing that got me stuck tinkering with building my own laser projector for so many years - trying to make it perfect - rather than just doing what it takes to move forward with the whole project and getting a quicker finish.

Over the years I’ve learned there’s an ebb and flow to creativity, and that the will to keep putting in extra time on projects that may or may not result in something significant is extremely vulnerable to being derailed by the relentless mundanity of life.

I’ve learned through hard-fought experience that there’s a value in just being sometimes, and not feeling like it’s a waste if I don’t fill every waking minute with doing or creating something.

I’m starting to really understand that giving myself permission to stop, take a step back or to the side, and pursue something else I find exciting, or even just sit for a while and watch the wind in the trees, has more value that hammering away at a project until I start to despise the whole thing.

I’ve discovered the value in taking time out to do ridiculous things that don’t move anything forward just because they remind me that creating is supposed to be fun.

So, the project’s not moving forward quite as fast as I’d like, but it’s okay - I’m making myself okay with it - because it will still be there when I have the time and space and enthusiasm enough to go at it again with new ideas, a fresh perspective, a functioning electric bike, an interesting (incomplete) timeline of my jobs and projects, and a collection of ridiculous tea bags.

*A fairly large collection of ridiculous tea bag ideas...I had to add more