Tech & Digital
3D printing, drones, electronics, home automation, custom keyboards — hobbies where the rabbit hole is real and the wrong first purchase costs a few hundred dollars. These beginner guides cover the entry-level kit that actually works out of the box, and the upgrade path most newcomers take next once they know what they actually want to build.
1 guide in this family
Ham Radio
Welcome to one of the most rewarding — and weirdly underrated — hobbies out there. You'll need to pass a short federal exam first: a week of study, a $15 fee, and you're licensed for 10 years. Then a $130 handheld transceiver gets you on local repeaters the same day your call sign posts. Here's exactly what to get.
Read the Ham Radio guide →Photo by FilterGrade on Unsplash
Tech & Digital glossary
Vocabulary from the maker space, the keyboard subreddit, and the FPV freestyle channel. A lot of these are acronyms hiding much simpler things.
- Bed leveling 3D printing
- Adjusting the print bed so the nozzle sits at the right distance everywhere — usually a sheet-of-paper thickness. Skip it and the first layer fails, which means the print fails.
- Brim 3D printing
- A flat single-layer skirt printed around a model's base to anchor it to the bed and prevent warping. Cheap insurance for finicky prints.
- Cherry MX Keyboards
- The dominant mechanical switch family, with color codes describing feel: Red (linear, smooth), Brown (tactile bump), Blue (clicky and loud). The reference everyone clones.
- Failsafe Drones
- Automatic behavior — usually "return to home" — if the drone loses signal or battery drops critical. Configure this before your first flight, not after.
- Filament 3D printing
- Plastic spool that feeds the printer. PLA is the friendly beginner default; PETG is tougher; ABS is strong but warps and stinks. Store in a dry bag.
- Hot-swappable Keyboards
- Sockets that let you change switches without soldering. Makes mechanical keyboards a much friendlier hobby than the old desolder-resolder days.
- Layer height 3D printing
- Vertical thickness of each printed slice. 0.2mm is standard; 0.1mm prints look smoother but take nearly twice as long. 0.3mm is fast and ugly.
- LiPo battery Drones
- Lithium-polymer battery — high energy density and the powerhouse of most drones. Punctured or overcharged LiPos can catch fire; store in a LiPo-safe bag.
- Slicing 3D printing
- The software step (Cura, PrusaSlicer, Bambu Studio) that turns a 3D model into machine instructions — gcode — your printer understands. Most beginner problems live in slicer settings.
- Switch Keyboards
- The mechanism under each keycap that registers a press. Tactile, linear, or clicky — the choice is personal and the rabbit hole is deep.