My first project, which was intended to be a box with 25 LED lights which could each be individually turned on or off with button switches, so the user could write letters or draw smiley faces or patterns. What I actually built was very similar to that. I ended up with a board of 30 LED's and 30 button switches inside a plastic bag. The bag's opacity helped make the drawn shapes more clear... I found that when you could see all the lights, even the ones turned off, it was harder to make out what you had drawn. I went with 30 lights simply because I had extra parts.
The most important things I learned from the project were soldering and how to get parts. I had some limited experience soldering before, but not very much, and this project required somewhere around 150 solders the way I went about it, and the number of times I messed up. I feel very, very comfortable soldering now, and it's much more enjoyable now that I'm not bad at it. I also had very little experience ording parts- my few previous electronics projects had been made from mostly found parts or a few things bought at RadioShack. I was completely amazed at how easy it was to get a whole bunch of push button switches from digikey to my room. Definitely a good resource to know about.
One thing I hope to do next time is be more ambitious. I feel like my project was far more technically simple than others... That said, I feel like my project was far more successful than most of the more technical ones... Mine worked in every way it was supposed to two days before the deadline, and just needed a new casing. So I'll try to be a little more ambitious this next time.
For now, I'm thinking I want to do something with sound for the next one. Light and sound seem to me like the fundamentals of electronic messingaroundage. They seem to be very small levels of the cool stuff you can do with relatively simple electronics. So I want to do both.
