Before you start any band

Ship Show your work

One video under sixty seconds and one post of five lines, per band. The evidence the band already wants, put where somebody can see it.

Time: 35 min
You need: A phone with a camera. Nothing else.
At once: Everybody, every band
Before this: Nothing. Read it before you finish your first band, and come back to it at the end of every one after that.

Sketches for this project

Every file opens with a plain-English header saying what it does and how to wire it, hole by hole.

Why

Nobody can see what you know

You can finish all nine bands, understand every one of them, and have nothing to show for it but a box of parts and a notebook.

That is the ordinary ending, and it is a waste. Somebody deciding whether to give you a job, a place on a course, or a contract cannot look inside your head. They can only look at what you have put where they can see it.

So this course asks for one more thing at the end of every band, and it is deliberately small.

One video under sixty seconds, and one post of five lines

That is the whole ask. Per band. Nine times.

It is not extra work. The video you post is the same video the band already asks you for as evidence. You are doing one piece of work once, in a place where somebody can see it, instead of doing it privately and then describing it later from memory.

Nine videos and nine posts, made while you were learning rather than remembered afterwards, is a portfolio. Very few people who finish an electronics course have one.

Knowledge and proof are different things

Knowledge is what you can do. Proof is what somebody else can check. This course is built so that the proof falls out of the learning rather than being bolted on at the end, which is why the evidence lists ask for videos and measurements rather than essays.

There is a second reason, and it is the more useful one. Writing about a build is where you find out whether you understood it. You will sit down to write five lines about your night guard and discover that you cannot say, in a sentence a stranger would follow, why the threshold needed two numbers. That discovery is worth more than the post.

The forty-five second video

15 min

Four shots. Nothing fancy. You are not making a film, you are showing that a thing works.

Shot	How long	What is in it
1. The thing	3 sec	The device, still, filling the frame. Nothing happening yet.
2. You do something to it	15 sec	Your hand moving in. The water going on the plate. The lamp switching off. Whatever its input is, happening for real.
3. It responds	15 sec	The lights, the beeping, the arm moving. Hold the shot until the response has finished. Cutting away early is the commonest mistake and it makes people think it did not work.
4. The honest bit	10 sec	Point the camera at your notebook page, your measurement, or the wire that was wrong the first time. This is the shot nobody else posts.

Nine things that make the difference, and none of them costs anything

Hold the phone upright, tall rather than wide. That shape fits both LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts without being cut.
Wipe the lens on your shirt first. Half of all bad phone video is a fingerprint.
Get close. The device should fill the frame. A photograph of a whole table is a photograph of nothing.
Put the light in front, not behind. A window behind the board turns the board into a silhouette. Turn round.
Tape the board down so it does not slide when you touch it.
Turn off the fan and the radio. If your device beeps, the beep is the point, and a ceiling fan will bury it.
Do not narrate if you would rather not. The words go in the post. Plenty of good build videos have no voice in them at all.
Film it twice. The second take is always better and it costs you ninety seconds.
Watch it back before you post it. Once. All the way through. You will catch something.

If the device only works sometimesFilm it working, and then say so in the post. “It works about eight times out of ten and I have not worked out why yet” is a better post than a clean claim, because it is true, because it is the kind of thing a person who has actually built things says, and because somebody in the comments may well tell you why. A portfolio of things that always worked first time is a portfolio nobody believes.

The five-line post

20 min

Five lines, in this order. It works because each line does a different job, and because the order puts the reader before the technology.

Line	What it does	The test
1	What it does, in the words of somebody who would use it	Would your aunt understand this line? If it contains the word Arduino, rewrite it.
2	What you did not know before you built it	One specific thing. Not “I learned a lot”.
3	What went wrong, and what fixed it	This is the line people actually read to the end.
4	A number you measured yourself	Yours, not one off a page. This is the line that proves you did it.
5	What you would build next with the same parts	Shows you can see past the instructions.

A worked example, from Band 4

A lamp that switches itself on when the room gets dark enough to matter, and does not flicker at dusk.

I did not know that a light sensor gives you a number with no meaning attached. The meaning is something you have to go and measure in the actual room, and nobody can do it for you.

My first version flickered on and off for about ten minutes every evening. One threshold was the problem. It needed two: switch on below 380, switch off above 520, so the reading has to genuinely change before anything happens.

Bright afternoon in my room reads 780. After sunset with the curtain open it reads 340. That gap is smaller than I expected and it is why the two numbers had to be close together.

Next I want to make it hold the lamp on for a fixed twenty minutes after somebody walks in, using the same sensor and a button.

#BozomaBuilds

Two hundred words. Fifteen minutes to write. It says more about what the person can do than a certificate would.

What not to write

The post that gets skipped“Excited to share my latest project! Day 12 of my Arduino journey. Learned so much. Stay tuned for more!”

Nothing in that is checkable. It has no number, no fault, no explanation, and it could have been written by somebody who never plugged anything in. Every line of the template above exists to stop you writing that post.

Do not describe the codeNobody wants a line-by-line tour of your sketch. Say what the device does for a person and what surprised you. If somebody wants the code, they will ask, and then you can send it.

Care

Before you post: three checks

Public means public. These take ten seconds each and they are not optional.

Ask anybody who is in shot. If you filmed somebody testing your device, ask them before you post it, and accept a no without argument. Their hand is fine; their face needs permission.
Look at the background. Your compound, your gate, a car number plate, a letter with an address on it, a phone number on a wall. Any of those in the frame means film it again against a plain wall.
Your own face is your choice. You never have to be in the video. Hands and the device are enough, and many of the best build accounts show nothing else.

If you are under eighteenTalk to a parent or guardian before you post anything publicly, and let them see the first one. That is not a rule about you, it is a rule about the internet.

Build

Nine posts make a portfolio

The point of using the same tag every time is that the posts stop being nine separate things and become one body of work that somebody can scroll through in two minutes.

Use #BozomaBuilds, on every post, from the first one. If the hub picks a different tag later, changing it is easier than starting a thread you never started.

Band	Point the camera at	The line worth writing
0	Your blink pattern, which nobody else has	Where the program actually lives once the cable is out
1	One full run of the light sequence	Why you write all three lights every time, even the off ones
2	The colour story, diffuser on	That the board cannot really dim a light, and what it does instead
3	A right entry, a wrong entry, and the lockout	Why a pressed button reads as 0
4	The moment it decides	Your two threshold numbers and how you measured them
5	Somebody playing your game	Why `delay` made the game miss presses
6	The mechanism moving, with the ground wire in shot	Two power sources, one shared ground, and what happens without it
7	Somebody using it, display readable	Your ruler-accuracy table and where the sensor lied to you
8	The device in the place it belongs, with the person whose problem it is	The criteria you wrote before you built, and how you scored against them

The tenth post

When Band 8 is done, write one more that is not about a build.

List the nine things you made, link them, and answer one question in a paragraph: what can you do now that you could not do at the start? Not what you learned. What you can do. That post is the one you send to somebody, and it only takes twenty minutes because the other nine did the work.

If you would rather not post publicly at allThen do all of it and keep it in a folder: same videos, same five lines, same tag in the filename. You lose the comments and the reach, which are real, and you keep every other benefit, including the one that matters most, which is finding out what you cannot yet explain. Nobody is required to be online to finish this course.

Done

Do this once, now

Before you carry on with whatever band you are in:

Decide where your posts will go. One place is enough to start.
Film forty-five seconds of whatever is on your board right now, using the four shots above, even if it is only Band 0's blink.
Write the five lines. Badly is fine. The first one is always the worst one.
Post it with the tag.

The first post is the hard one and it is hard for everybody. The ninth takes fifteen minutes and you will not think about it.