Hello!
First off, thanks to all who have contributed to the prizes for this contest. The generosity toward those who are new is commendable and I, for one, hope to be able at a point sometime in the future to do likewise.
That said, here is my entry:
It took me a bit to discover that Electrical Engineering was the coolest of any field one could pursue as an education/career of any option out there! I piddled around at community college claiming I was pursuing a mechanical engineering degree but I just didn't have a passion for the field. I'm not sure what it was that made me look seriously at EE but since I have I have been plowing through the degree as quickly as I can. I'm currently top of my class as a full-time student (Junior, or 3rd year) at a 4-year university while working full-time doing IT work for a fortune 500 logistics company to support my beautiful wife and 2 young daughters (under 4 years old). My oldest daughter (3) knows how a breadboard works because I'm always tinkering and I love showing her what I'm doing. Breadboarded LEDs are her favorite component.
I also have the opportunity to participate in an FPGA hardware security research group at my university and am coming to love digital design in VHDL. I mention all of these things merely to point out that, in spite of how busy I am, I find absolute joy in building all things electronic.
My hobby projects include quadcopters, a 3D printer, a small board-PC-based doorbell system that texts us a picture of whoever rings our doorbell in real-time, and a wireless swimming pool temperature monitoring system. For my research group I'm trying to wrap my head around designing and laying out a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA board. It's been a real trip so far.
My lab equipment consists of a cheap AutoZone DMM, an Analog Discovery 2 lab-in-a-box, and my pride and joy, a Rigol DS1054Z (purchased on the recommendation of so many on this forum). I've been scraping and scrounging to save up for a good multi-channel bench power supply but that's still off in the future somewhere. I should probably design and build one but I kind of want it to look good and be easy to use and I'm not confident my first go at it would satisfy either of those requirements. Either the 1074Z or the combo DMM/Frequency Counter prizes would be extensively used as I troubleshoot my designs and strive to reverse engineer others' designs I come across.
Attached is the picture of my computer desk which also serves as my workbench. I've been delaying posting waiting until I could clean up my desk but I figure this is an accurate reflection of my workspace with everything I have going on. Lest one think the Altium Designer application up on the monitor means I'm rolling in money, it is the student version ($120/yr) and was provided by my university.
I am in the US and appreciate your consideration of my entry into this contest.
If anyone has any questions or suggestions that would flesh out my "Beginner's Profile" feel free to let me know and I'll be happy to update this post.