While working on another project, I wanted a circle of individually-addressable LEDs. The plan was to create slowly spinning light animations but I never got there. Making the wheel of LEDs itself ended up being a lot of work! I ran out of time and abandoned the idea.
Sometime later, I realized I could’ve just bought a wheel of LEDs instead of making it myself. There were more LEDs in the wheel and the method for controlling them was much much better than the stacks of MOSFETs I had soldered in the back. Mine was a mess.
So now the painstakingly-made but basically unusable wheel hangs on the wall as a reminder.
As much as possible, use existing tools made by more capable folks and build on their shoulders. It was an important lesson for me: even in software projects I often gotten bogged down writing some 2D algorithm from scratch when a perfectly good library would’ve solved it much more quickly.
