Puts skin in the game. No kidding in 1987 I actually did convince a professor to agree to an independent study course for me and a friend to build a voice synt

Puts skin in the game. No kidding in 1987 I actually did convince a professor to agree to an independent study course for me and a friend to build a voice synthesizer on an IBM PC proto board using the TI chipset available at the time and the only terms of the class would be that he gave us the grade my computer verbally asked him for at the end of the semester. We actually built two of them, one for each of us. It was wire-wrapped. We had no backup plan whatsoever and it was a brave/stupid thing to do, but we both got A's and the prof told us his only regret was that he didn't have us make one for him too. Even more skin was that it went into my own IBM PC, so if I blew that up not only wouldn't I have had enough credits to graduate but PCs were very expensive at the time. These days you can blow up a Raspberry Pi and who cares.