SparkFun Electronics Commentsurn:uuid:214d0e4e-f1b1-d287-ce26-ac5b4c9f82492024-03-28T19:13:41-06:00SparkFun ElectronicsCustomer #134773 on 10 Back-To-School Projects to Celebrate Fall! Customer #134773urn:uuid:9971f87a-acb2-8553-7b2e-f72da52cff0f2018-09-18T12:50:48-06:00<p>Thanks, Feldi, for the nice post. You took me down "memory lane" in a few ways. I recall back about the time I was starting to become interested in electronics that I had thought of a career in running an office supply store. The "big chain" supply stores of today (as well as the school and office sections of the "big box" stores) are a sorry excuse for the old indipendant office supply stores of yore (the last one I recall being in was about 1983 in San Jose, CA). Being "nerdy", I recall revelling in things like polar graph paper and logarithmic graph paper. Today it can be hard to find even quadrille paper! (I guess that's not surprising, having encountered a librarian who had never heard of <em>Nature</em> magazine.)<p>A couple quick comments on the projects: Given some of the news reports, maybe the hoverboard should include a fire extinguisher (tongue in cheek), and a good extension on the Illuminated Pencil Box would be to use addressable LEDs so color effects could be included! (Back in my school days, about the best we could have mustered would have been a flashlight bulb, a couple of batteries and a switch. LEDs hadn't yet been invented!)</p><p>One other thought: I generally look for "pencil boxes" at the back-to-school sales, and sometimes use them as cases for projects and other times use them to keep the "bits & pieces" together for each of my multitude of projects that are "in progress".</p><p>Sure glad I went with electronics rather than office supplies!</p></p>