About

This site contains a collection of do-it-yourself projects and experiments in the domains of electronics, mechanics, chemistry and coding, with some math thrown in for good measure.

Why NoKit?

The name, “no kit”, was inspired by the idea of building things from scratch, i.e. not using a predesigned kit. There’s of course nothing wrong with building from kits, it’s a great way to get started and hit the ground running in a new space, but there’s something to be said for figuring out the basics and doing your own design as well. Making all the mistakes, reprinting a part ten times until it fits, burning underdimensioned components, and so on, is a great learning experience that you miss out on when using someone else’s design.

“Learning through failure” can be time consuming but in the end very effective because knowing what doesn’t work is often where the deep insights hide. Systematically troubleshoot, pushing constraints, iterate, and making tradeoffs towards better solutions is engineering in a nutshell. No-one got it right the first time, except by luck.

So this site focuses on projects where at least some parts are adjusted or modified to suite our needs and ideas and circumstances (and budget).

Having said that, taking “from scratch” literally would mean you’d have to start mining and refining your own minerals, which would be going a bit too far. Though definitely interesting, might add that to the chemistry section…

Who’s behind the site?

A home-schooling family of four who loves building, tinkering, and taking things apart to see how they work.