What
Opus NI is a multidisciplinary internet forum for sharing NI based technical projects.
ōpus
/ˈoː.pʊs/ (Classical Latin)
n., 2nd declensionwork; labor; production; A completed task, effort, or creation (e.g., a building, book, or musical composition).
masterpiece; great work. Often used for significant artistic or literary achievements (pl. opera).English derivatives: opera, opus (as in “Opus 13” for a numbered musical work), operate.
Opus NI is an internet forum. If you are a wee lad you mightn’t know what that means, so let me tell you. It is like facebook or twitter but for a specific community. The benefit is seeing things that you actually want to know about, while also not selling your God given time on earth to Zuckerberg.
What is this specific community? Let me tell you that too. Opus NI is for anyone to share there interesting technical STEM projects. Be your project hardware, software, for work, for fun, open source, for profit, for uni, pre-design, or ready and polished – so long as you are from NI, you are welcome to share your efforts here.
This is of course written at the beginning, so there is little example to follow. Thus let me be clear on what type of projects are welcome; any technical discipline, any scale. For example:
- Training an ML Model
- Building a RC airplane
- Building a real airplane
- Building a bridge
- Writing some piece of software, website, or SAAS
- Designing an integrated circuit board
- Robots
- Machinery modifications
- Generating electricity
- … you get the point
Why
The point is locality and multidisciplinary project. Probably there is a forum or sub-reddit for the things you are doing and the methods you are using. But how boring, and who even are those people anyway. The posts you will see here are highly relevant to such enterprising and innovative persons as yourself.
Why would you want to share these things? Because it is to everyone’s benefit that these undertakings are exposed to the public. Sharing your efforts will benefit you in any number of ways: it helps you see your own bigger picture, it helps you reach local folk that are of similar interests, it helps you market your thing. It benifits the others on here for all the same reasons.
Why not Reddit or Discord? Reddit makes my skin crawl, and we aim to be a little more formal than the infinite text thread format of Discord. LinkedIn too… don’t even get me started. 
How
When creating your project thread please aim to make the first and subsequent posts structured. Your first post should address What, Why, and How. It doesn’t need to be as formal as a research paper, but please use headings and good grammar. Include diagrams, pictures, links to resource etc. And remember that the readers may not speak the same jargon as is used in your field. Some discussion will hopefully ensue. Then when it comes time to post updates, do so in the same thread, and again keep it structured. You may want to identify update posts with a heading, UPDATE #2 in bold lettering.
In addition to Projects, there will be a General category for discussion of anything, feedback, nonsense, whatever. Things that don’t warrant a Project thread but should be shared or discussed with people that are on here.
Example Project Post Structure
Title
What is it
Why you are creating it
Inspiration
Goals
Methods
Challenges
All are optional, use your common sense.
Profile
- Take the time to fill out your profile.
- Include what you are good at, what sort of work you do, what you study… some indication for others to know where you are coming from in terms of expertise.
- Preferably use your real name.
- Preferably leave some contact method or link to socials.
Some pointers
- for videos just paste a youtube link it will automatically embed
- helpful tools:
Rules
- Insufficiently complex or interesting project will likely be removed after encouragement.
- Be decent.
- You must give and accept criticism as constructive.
- No cringe posting or slop.