Absolutely: I consider all these things to be there just to keep me honest and moving forwards. And I like to do a “lessons learned” review after each project as well. I did that with my Teensy Load thing (my version of the Current Sink or Swim) after some really helpful discussions on the forum here, and I have some good ideas for improvements for a rev 2 there.
For this one, the “lessons learned” are mostly “don’t do that”! There won’t be an MBaaS version 2!
I honestly trapped myself a bit with this project. It seemed like a fun little idea, and the initial execution (the “MBaaS” web app) wasn’t hard at all. But to make something like this that produces circuits that are practical to manufacture would be a much more complex job. The circuits it produces are nasty tangles of 74xx combinatorial logic, and laying them out is just really hard. To do a truly good job on this, you’d need to develop some strong heuristics for gate and pin swapping to make sure the placement of logic onto the 74xx chips is realistically routeable. That’s not a trivial problem, and I didn’t do it because it wouldn’t teach me any electronics. And I only realised what a bear of a problem it was after I’d more or less finished the MBaaS web app and was trying to lay out some of the circuits it produced.