Dear Future Me

Dear future me,

The desk in front of me is cluttered with electronics with jumper wires tangled across the surface, blinking LEDs, and half-finished circuits, waiting to be completed. None of these projects turned out as planned, but each left behind a fragment of wisdom, a lesson embedded in the remains of what I couldn’t complete.

This is not a confession of failure. It is a letter, folded gently across time, reminding you that:

• Momentum carries farther than perfection.
• Unfinished work still leaves its mark.
• Even silence from a project is feedback worth hearing.

Here are my thoughts from circuits that never fully awoke, but still taught me how to listen.

Project One: Dance Dance Revolution, College-Hack Edition

It was meant for a college exhibition: a three-by-three grid of tiles, each with hidden infrared eyes, waiting for the thunder of dancing feet. On screen, notes slid forward like a river of light. Friends stomped, seniors tried, strangers laughed. For a few shining minutes, the room was alive with rhythm.

The secret was not hardware but empathy. Feet don’t speak in clean signals; they shout in messy clusters. A stomp is noise, not truth. The trick was to treat it as music: sample fast, soften the edges, and reward near misses with grace. When the crowd cheered for a perfect run, I forgot the whole thing was held together with tape.

It taught me this: people don’t care if your creation is fragile, they care if it feels alive.

Project Two: A Magic Light That Welcomes You Home

I wanted a light that whispered “welcome home.” The mind of it was an ATmega328P, the eyes a motion sensor and a tiny photodiode. But the cleverest part was its sense of time: it asked the sky itself, fetching sunset from an API to know when darkness had truly begun.

The lamp moved in three moods: waiting, glowing, resting, like a breath cycle of the house. On my bench, it behaved like poetry. Near a wall socket, it misbehaved like a sulking child. Wires hummed, sensors twitched, relays buzzed. I learned that electronics, too, have temperaments; calm them with decoupling, soothe them with patience.

state = WAITING
loop forever
  ambient = read_light()
  motion = read_motion()
  if state == WAITING
    if ambient < dark_level and motion
      turn_light_on()
      start_timer(on_duration)
      state = LIGHTING
  else if state == LIGHTING
    if timer_done()
      turn_light_off()
      start_timer(cooldown)
      state = COOLDOWN
  else if state == COOLDOWN
    if timer_done()
      state = WAITING
  small_delay()

One evening, with the right cooldown and the sky’s permission, the flicker disappeared. The lamp no longer argued, it simply welcomed. And I learned that sometimes a single conditional, a tiny pause, can transform annoyance into elegance.

Project Three: Two Tiny Watches That Whisper in Morse

This one still makes me grin. Two wrist gadgets, each with a soft LED and a vibration motor. Press a button, and it sends a word in Morse code over Bluetooth. A dot becomes a blink, a dash becomes a longer blink, and your friend across the table feels the secret handshake on their wrist.

Imagine it in a café: a tiny tap for hello, a long pulse for yes, a playful rhythm for an inside joke. The technology was deliberately simple but the point was the feeling. A private language that fit in your pocket.

This idea belonged to a friendship as much as to circuitry. Many of its best parts were dreamed up with Nirav while walking and daydreaming through the streets of Pokhara, wondering what it would feel like to speak without speaking.

def send(text)
  for each letter in text
    for each symbol in encode_morse(letter)
      if symbol == DOT then blink_for(1) else blink_for(3)
      wait(1)
    wait(3)

def receive()
  observe edges into durations
  normalize durations into units
  group units into letters and words
  return decoded_text

The hard part wasn’t software. It was the case: making something tiny that felt good on the wrist. Bluetooth was the quick win for a working demo, but my notebook still has sketches of antennas stretching between hills, carrying messages farther than any café table.

The lesson: sometimes the best ideas live more in the imagination than the breadboard, and that’s okay.

What unfinished taught me

The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire

I was tempted to call these failures. That would miss the point. The DDR pad taught me to treat inputs as conversations not one time readings. The lights taught me that state machines tidy up life at the edge of the physical world. The watches taught me to design the story first and the circuit second. All three taught me to isolate feedback from sensing so that the loop keeps its rhythm.

I have not failed. I have found ten thousand ways that do not work.
Thomas Edison

A project can give back before it ships. A sketch can give back before it runs. Even the act of naming states makes later work cleaner. The craft is in returning with a smaller question, not in forcing a big answer in one sitting.

Notes to future me

A year from now you may wish you had started today.
Karen Lamb

Pick one tiny slice and land it. For the pad, make one arrow feel right on timing and leave the rest for later. For the lamp, ship a desk version on low voltage with safer parts before you touch anything near the wall. For the watches, get one device to send the word hi in Morse to itself and light once when it decodes correctly. Small victories change how the next evening feels.

Write down thresholds and units in a notebook so your next run starts where this one ended. When the signal looks messy, average a little and decide on edges. When a device must feel instant, decouple sensing from display. When choices stack up, choose the one that gets you to the next observation fastest. When the world outside changes, let a simple API like sunset time help you decide.

A quiet promise

If you come back, return gently. Don’t demand a finished symphony; play a single note well. If life leads elsewhere, let this letter be proof: unfinished things are not wasted. They keep us learning, keep us honest, keep us curious.

And curiosity, dear future me, is the truest circuit of all.

With patience and love,

Me