Hi, and welcome to my electronics oriented blog that will hopefully introduce you gently to some of the concepts of electronics, microcontrollers, and programming using the Arduino platform at the same time I am learning them myself.
My name is Graham and I am a tinkerer, hoarder, scavenger, take-it-apart-to-see-how-it-workserer, and constant source of frustration to my long suffering wife. I also spend as little as possible on this hobby, doing everything I can 'on the cheap' or for free. I am sure that my philosophies in this respect will resonate with others among you, who I hope will become regular companions on my journey.
My day-job is as the IT manager, helpdesk operator, analyst, fixer, and password-resetter for my company's presence throughout Australia and New Zealand. While I am currently a one-man band doing everything IT and communications related, my background is in systems and business analysis, system design, and programming, and I have had a lifetime exposed to technology.
As a young teenager in the 70s, I was living in the UK at the time that computers first made an appearance in the home - I started my interest in computers and electronics by purchasing and assembling the Compukit UK101 computer, which gave me some experience with a soldering iron, but otherwise left me pretty frustrated by its incredibly limited capabilities. Around the same time, Clive Sinclair launched the ZX 80, then the ZX 81 (which I bought in kit form and assembled too), and finally the colour ZX Spectrum, with a massive 16K of RAM, which I also bought. Other notable computers that were born at the time include the Commodore 64, Dragon-32, and Acorn's BBC Micro (that was aimed at schools, and accompanied by an educational TV series showing how to use it). By the time I left school, I was so enamoured by both building and using computers, I told my careers officer that I wanted to work in electronics, hopefully as a computer engineer for IBM... It never happened, and the closest I got was a brief spell working as a technician for British Telecom. However, the rest of my career has been spent working with computers one way or another, even if not working on them, but that interest in how they really work and what all the bits on a PCB actually do, never left me.
My mind comes up with random little projects from time to time, and this blog is born from one of those. I recently rebuilt the porch at the front of the house and wanted to put a light into it, but there was no easy way to get mains power there - so I started thinking about perhaps doing something solar-powered. This led to the dismantling of some solar powered garden lamps and Christmas fairy lights, and learning about their circuitry and some basic concepts around the use of solar panels for battery charging, and a circuit design called a Joule Thief that makes a single 1.5v AA battery appear to generate a much higher voltage to power a whole string of LEDs.
From this came an overwhelming desire to get myself a breadboard so that rather than just soldering salvaged components together, I could tinker in a less permanent and slightly more organised way. A search on ebay revealed that while I could get a reasonable sized breadboard for less than $3, I could also get a cheap Chinese clone Arduino board for just a couple of dollars more... This opened up a whole new avenue of possibilities, that I thought would be far too expensive for me, and that was the start of this whole venture.
Please join me in future posts, where I will reveal my final shopping list (that covered a little more than just a breadboard, but still cost less than a week's worth of coffee each morning); setting up my testing workbench; potentially powering the workbench from solar energy and (salvaged) 12V batteries; and then the projects that I will undertake - which may even include the solar powered downlight in the porch that was the original inspiration for this blog (or maybe not - it will be a lot more difficult to install now that the porch construction is completed...) I look forward to continuing this journey with your company, and hope we can learn together.
No comments:
Post a Comment