Juan Ignacio Di lalla Spataris is 11 years old, he is in the sixth grade of a public school and his passion for electronics made him an inventor. “Transistors”, “plates”, “Arduino”, “modify code” are some of the words that stand out when he tells what he does, and since he turned five he has been curious about what things are made of.
In the room he shares with his younger brother, and with the help of his parents, he set up a kind of workshop. There are her tools spread out on a desk, a table with a 3D printer donated to her, and his projects in his splendor: from a portable radioup to a smart watch (a smart watch), a retro video game console, a wireless cell phone charger, a YouTube channel subscriber counter, and the list goes on.
Plates, computers, and animation drawings pasted on the walls also make up his space for invention: “Electronics is something that runs in the family and it’s like it comes from inside me, because when I do something with electronics I really enjoy it”Juani commented in an interview with Télam.
“My friends, nothing to do with electronics. I learn almost everything onlineWhen I see something that I like, I can contact the person and tell him what I thought or ask him how I can do it too. And there are times when in order not to bother that person, I try to find out, “he recounted about the tutorials he finds on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
His parents, Victoria and Lucas, accompany him every step he takes and they were the ones who discovered the passion that Juani began to show when he was very young. “When I was younger, my dad worked at a CNG place and he would bring me some engines that he took out of cars or recycled.”
“With his help, I wondered what I could do with it and experimented: put a battery in it and see that it turned on. Then I dabbled with speakers and I began to discover how electromagnetic energy worked”Juani explained, with the same passion with which he is about to show some of his projects on camera.
During that time he remembers that he was given a meccano, “which was some plates with some screws to be able to join”, and that is where he sets the beginning of his path with inventions.
“Later, when the pandemic came, I started researching electronics on the internet to be able to do something. It occurred to me to upload a video to TikTok of an amplifier because as a boy I was always a big fan of audio,” said the young man, whose account is managed by his parents and is @juanixdf_
He was “very” interested in an audio amplifier and decided to upload a video on how to make it: “He was very successful. and that boosted me and made me want to continue uploading tutorials on how to make electronic projects. My main idea is to teach.
“The comments were one better than the other. They said that ‘he was a genius’, that they saw a future for him,” added Victoria, Juani’s mother, to which he remarked: “I was very moved by the comments, that night I couldn’t sleep.”
His inventions
Asked what his first invention was, the young man replies: “I can’t tell you exactly which one was the first, but I can tell you which ones were among the first.”
“One of them was a alarm that detected light with a photocell and activated a loudspeaker, like a cicada that made sounds. So when he detected that there was sunlight, it would sound,” he recalled.
The other was a timer: “It was pressing a button, a capacitor was discharged and when it was finished discharging the LED turned off. They were simple projects”, he expresses with genuine humility.
And at 11 years old he already recognizes his evolution: “I think I was perfecting my way of speaking to be able to explain the tutorials, and also my way of thinking to know how to be able to do them, how to be able to facilitate them”.
Beyond electronics, it shows his passion for teaching: “Well today a person could buy an amplifier, but they don’t know how it works. So I explain how to make it, what can be done cheaper and how it works”.
“Now I’m doing a retro video game console that has a lot of games, among them a well-known one that is the space invaders. He had also made another one that was for a television, to play tetris“, he listed.
Among his current developments, he is experimenting with a pocket radio: “It is an ultra-compact radio, I still need to finish it because I have the problem that some components are missing that are not manufactured here.”
The missing component is an “Atmega 328-mu”which is why if someone has it, contact their parents to get it or make a donation.
But Juani is very clear about what he needs: “There is an Arduino nano that has an ‘Atmega’ that is very small. Well, the ‘Atmega-mu’ is even smaller and that is the one that cannot be found, and the one that missing to be able to finish my project”.
And it doesn’t stop at his inventions, about the smartwatch that is developing account that its main quality is bluetooth connection to the cell phone: “From there to the screen you can graph what you receive, such as a call, some email notification or social networks”.
Also, he said that he will have a “environmental temperature meter, clock, alarm clock” and that “it is rechargeable and short-circuit proof”.
“One of my latest projects, which I did with programming boards that use the Arduino interface, is the youtube subscriber counter. It connects to Wi-Fi, and through a Google api, from there you have the number of live subscribers that people have, “he stressed.
Your present, your future
For some of his projects, Juani has to have plates manufactured in China. But it is himself who designs those platesthrough a 3D program that allows you to see it on the screen and simulates the platelet virtually.
“Once you give the OK to the plate, it generates the file, you send it by mail and they physically manufacture it for you. But all that design is done by Juani”, adds Lucas, his father.
Beyond being self-taught, he sometimes receives programming classes. The young man commented that you want to deepen your knowledge and that you would like to learn Python. “I don’t know how to program a complete code, but I do know how to modify it, for example in (the language) C++”.
On one occasion, Juani went to robotics classes, but he noticed that what he was interested in was one more step: “What interests me is not only building robots, but manufacturing those modules that are bought to build robots.
Regarding his future, he points out that “he has not yet defined what is going to follow”, and it is natural since he is only 11 years old. But he anticipates that “I’m sure it will be something related to electronics or programming.”
