A rant on personal engineering projects

Summary

Joey B uses a hypothetical UAV project to explain why the priorities of a professional engineering project differ from those of a personal project. The example drone must fly 10 km, carry 10 lb, take photos or video, hover, and operate without GNSS/GPS.

He describes three roles and the main risk—or “great filter”—each must overcome:

1. Optics engineer at a large company: Responsible for ensuring the cameras and other optical systems meet the UAV’s requirements, such as working at range, while hovering, and under different lighting or spectral conditions. The main constraint is staying within budget. If the design does not work, the company may find another supplier or change the requirements.
2. Avionics systems engineer: Ensures the drone’s subsystems work together. The central risk is system interoperability. If integration fails, a large company can bring in outside expertise, acquire technology, or replace the engineer while continuing the project.
3. Personal-project builder: One person is responsible for every discipline, from avionics and optics to propulsion, structures, guidance, navigation, control, and flight software. The key risk is not finishing at all. There is no larger organization to take over if the project stalls.

The core argument is that personal projects should often prioritize reaching a workable finish line over optimizing every component. A solution that is imperfect or uneconomical to produce at scale may still make sense for a one-off project if it achieves the required result and allows work to continue.

Joey gives thermal paste as an example: a different material or application might be better for manufacturing many units, but the method he used was sufficient to complete his project. Likewise, if troubleshooting a CAN bus becomes a major obstacle, switching to another communication method—or dropping the feature—may be better than letting it prevent completion.

Cost and good engineering practices still matter. The point is that, for personal projects, they may be less important than avoiding endless refinement and finishing. Joey encourages people with unfinished projects to consider whether they can simplify or descope them to get across the finish line.

Reviews, Guides, or Tutorials

• No formal product review or step-by-step tutorial is presented.
• The video refers to an earlier camera-related video that showed Joey’s thermal-paste approach.
• CAN bus and alternatives such as SPI, I²C, and RS-432 are mentioned as examples of technical choices that could be changed to keep a project moving.

Main Speaker and Source

• Joey B, speaking at a whiteboard on the BPS Shorts channel.