Sometimes I feel like an idiot!

Let me explain.

I have a project on which I’ve been working, on and off, for about two months. last weekend the project was almost complete, but I didn’t have time to finish it, so I put it aside. So last night I returned home from a week long business trip where I worked over 60 hours in five days. Needless to say I was exhausted. But this morning I thought I’d reward myself and just “finish up” my project. Ought to be fun, right? So I finished up the last of the wiring, looked everything over, checked voltages, and pronounced it “ready to go”. So I fired it up with anticipation and what did I get for my trouble? Hum; and lots of it!

Now is where the problem starts. I’m tired, cranky, and really not in the right frame of mind. And I mentally freak out! “The design is bad“, “the chassis is too small“, “the transformer is bad“, “I messed up the design“, “I messed up the build“, “I’ll never get it to work“, “I’ve wasted two months of effort“, “I won’t be able to fix it“, “it’s a total failure“, “why did I ever try to build this“, all went through my mind in about 30 seconds. So in a significant huff and with some inventive profanity, I killed power on my work bench, and walked out of the room. Then I proceeded to walk around the house, in a huff, alternating between being very angry and feeling sorry for myself.

So a few hours later, and after I’ve had something to eat and had a chance to calm down, I decide I’m going to hook the audio portion on the project to my bench power supply and see if it’s ok, thinking “maybe it’s just a power supply thing“. So I do, and the project sounds great. And as I sit staring into the amp and trying to figure things out, I see it; or rather, them. They’re mistakes. Just little things. Like I hadn’t connected the filament center tap to signal ground. I also hadn’t appropriately grounded the front plate where a headphone jack was located. And I hadn’t properly grounded the signal input and volume control. They were the normal list of little things anyone typically finds when finishing up a project. So I went to work. After about an hour of effort, including soldering a couple of connections I had only wrapped before, I fired it up again. And the results were far, far better. And I felt like a fool.

This is a hobby for me. Something that’s supposed to be a pleasurable past time. And coming off a 60 hour work week that crossed several time zones, I really should have known better than to dive into a complicated electronics project. Especially one at the critical juncture of final assembly and checkout. I know that being in the right frame of mind is very important, but I don’t always take what I know to be the best course of action.

So this is, in the end, just another lesson in paying attention and thinking things through. I could have, in point of fact should have, waited a few days and arrived at the same result with far less aggravation. So this is my advice, think about your state of mind. After all, this is supposed to fun, not aggravating.