When did you start electronics

[skillz21]

This is a first for me, a question that's not super serious... At what age did you guys start doing electronics? I want to know if when I started electronics was average or early (not late, since I can't really imagine a kid younger than 7 or 8 years old playing with batteries and motors) But yeah, I started doing electronics when I was about 7.... is that early? I'm curious about how you guys started doing electronics, what were your inspirations, and when did you decide you liked playing with electronics?

[bd139]

About 7, when I discovered jumble sales in the UK. I used to buy transistor and valve radios and try and fix them (mostly unsuccessfully, sometimes involving fire). My parents used the "benevolent neglect" methodology of parenting. Then I got bought a Radio Shack 160-in-1 for Christmas and I was hooked.

Soldering when I was about 8-9. First scope when I was 12 (car boot sale telequipment D61).

TBH I had absolutely no idea what I was doing properly until I went to university and stuff mostly worked by luck.

[skillz21]

About 7, when I discovered jumble sales in the UK. I used to buy transistor and valve radios and try and fix them (mostly unsuccessfully, sometimes involving fire). My parents used the "benevolent neglect" methodology of parenting. Then I got bought a Radio Shack 160-in-1 for Christmas and I was hooked.

Soldering when I was about 8-9. First scope when I was 12 (car boot sale telequipment D61).

TBH I had absolutely no idea what I was doing properly until I went to university and stuff mostly worked by luck.

Nice! I should really get an oscillescope...

[HighVoltage]

First 230V shock when I was 3 and touched the outlet with nail.

Took my first tube radio apart when I was 5 but could not get it back together.
And from that time on it went forward.
About 8 or 9, when things also ended up back together and worked.
After that I repaired TVs and Radios for people in our village.

First high voltage shock from a TV transformer when I was 10.

My first scope came from our school when I was 13, a Leybold scope, very similar to the picture.
Oh, was I happy about this one!

[alexanderbrevig]

Two years ago (jumped into it and got hired for one of these IoT startups that popped up everywhere).
My previous experience? Just some tinkering with Arduino (over a hundred libraries written and published).

Two years later I actually know how to lay out a PCB rather propery, I know how to impedance match, how to write proper firmware, how to read datasheets, how to debug, how to DFM etc. It's been a stressful time..!
While at it I'd like to thank this article https://startupbros.com/21-ways-overcome-impostor-syndrome/

As a kid I loved taking things apart, and I (ab)used the LEGO mindstorms kit quite a while.
I love electronics.

[skillz21]

Wow, after hearing all of these stories, I don't feel so... alone (lol what)? Idk I mean I don't know anyone (as in real life) who knows at least how much I do when it comes to electronics... it's pretty annoying when I do something cool and want to tell people about it.... no one understands what the hell I'm talking about.... 

[sibeen]

I was ripping apart old radios and sundry gear by the time I was about 9 or thereabouts. I was always the nerd at school. Eventually made a career out of it, and still do. Yet as a 55 year old engineer I still find the subject fascinating; yet in all this time the software side has never interested me. I've learnt, in a very cursory fashion some code over the years; not really more than a led blinking or a basic subroutine. Boring

It's still the hardware side that intrigues me. I'm a power engineer, or at least a medium power engineer. If it's below 100 amps it's probably not worth measuring I'm constantly amazed by the times I say to myself, "WTF happened there". It what keeps me interested and amused...and employed

[schmitt trigger]

As a teenager, I would help my grandfather repair tube radios.

He was not an EE, not even a technician. But he had insatiable technical curiosity and was a consummate tinkerer.

He did read several electronics books, though.
He gave me the Van Valkenburg, Nooger and Neville's "Basic Electronics", volumes 1 thru 6.

[skarecrow]

I really don't remember exactly when electronics started interesting me, perhaps before my first memories. Probably around the same time I got into computers. I started playing (VERY BASIC) computer games on a Heathkit computer when I was 3. When I was 4 I got a Commodore VIC-20 and started writing my own games.

It must have been around the same time that I started tinkering with other electronics. My older brother and I had a bunch of those 100+ in one learning lab kits and I was ALWAYS building circuits with them, often stringing several kits together to make more advanced stuff than any 1 was capable of.

I couldn't have been much older than that when I learned how to properly use an analog multimeter and a soldering iron. I used to love taking things apart and trying to change how they worked, or make them do things they were never intended to do. I remember one time after messing with the electronics inside a Spiderman RC car a spark shot out of it and hurt my leg pretty bad, then all of a sudden a radio station was coming out of the car. To this day I have no idea what I did or how any sound at all was coming out of it. It didn't have a speaker in it!

I'm confident I know more about electronics than just about everyone I know since I started so young, but I still consider myself a beginner in a lot of ways.

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[jmelson]

I was tinkering with electronic stuff probably when I was about 9, didn't actually accomplish much but had fun with it.
Started building various things from tube and transistor data books when I was maybe 12.  I converted a war surplus radar scope to a very primitive oscilloscope when I was about 16.  I got hired as a technician at an outfit that did communications research and field testing as a summer job when I was 18, just before going off to college (1968).

I got a summer job in 1975 that turned into a career, and built and connected up air pollution measuring instruments for a group doing EPA studies.  Some of it was from aircraft, so we had a lot of interesting integration/interfacing tasks to tie our data acq. gear into the plane's nav system, run instruments off 28 V without allowing spikes through, etc.

I did that for 9 years, and then moved over to another group doing basic nuclear science (shooting ions from particle accelerators at targets and measuring the particles that fly off.)  We make most of our own data acq. gear as nothing commercial is compact or cheap enough, when you are talking about 100+ channels.  Now, we are making our own ICs to make it smaller and cheaper.  One channel is a discriminator (detects occurrence of signal arrival), active filter and peak detector.  Then, put 16 of those channels on one chip, 2 chips on a board and 16 boards on a motherboard, in a housing roughly the size of a breadbox.  So, that is 512 channels.  So, that has been a good part of my work for the last 10 years.
I wrote the GUIs that set up the chip's configuration, designed everything but the chips themselves, and build and maintain it all.  (Good job security, too, as nobody else understands the whole system.)

Jon

[skillz21]

What are these tube radios that keep getting mentioned?

[skarecrow]

What are these tube radios that keep getting mentioned?

It's like the old audio-only version of youtube, but you couldn't rewind or replay anything unless you paid for the cassette deck upgrade. :-D

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[skarecrow]

I thought you were being funny and then I noticed your age on your profile. There's a good chance you may have been serious and don't know what they are. Before transistors, radios (and quite a lot of other electronics) used vacuum tubes. Hence the term tube radio. A lot of current high end audiophile gear uses tubes because some people like the sound they produce much better.

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[BradC]

I was about 4. Started with some old Email quicklag breakers, 3V MES lamps, D cell battery holders and croc-clip jumpers. For my 5th birthday mum and dad made me a component board where they mounted a heap of switches, lamp holders, a buzzer and a battery holder to an old cupboard door. Each device had terminals made from a 3/16" bolt that I could connect together with croc-clips or wind wire around. I'm positive about 30 seconds after giving it to me they regretted putting an old electromechanical buzzer on there.

I have my 3 year old playing with croc-clip jumpers, batteries, LEDs and resistors. He said to me the other night, "Daddy when it's christmas time I'm getting my *own* soldering iron". Umm, no he's *not*. I had to wait until I was 6, he can wait until he's 6.
I still have the Email quicklag breakers in a box for him to play with when his fingers get a bit stronger.

[bjcuizon]

What are these tube radios that keep getting mentioned?

Tubes...a.k.a. Vacuum Tubes, Valves, electron tube <-- These things were used in the old day. They got replaced with the transistors, integrated circuits and todays microcontrollers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube

[Fire Doger]

I loved to screw screws on a cardboard at the age of 2-3, a couple of hundred per day
I got into electronics around 12 with a fm radio kit for kids (which never worked) and trying to solder broken wires on toys with lighter but nothing more. Real trigger came when I saw how good I was on pseudo code at high school.
I believe that engineers are born to be engineers, figuring it out though is matter of education.

Wow, after hearing all of these stories, I don't feel so... alone (lol what)? Idk I mean I don't know anyone (as in real life) who knows at least how much I do when it comes to electronics... it's pretty annoying when I do something cool and want to tell people about it.... no one understands what the hell I'm talking about.... 

I am trying to teach my best friend to have someone to talk about...

[mainman]

Like most of us, I started at 4 taking apart and putting back together my toys.

[BradC]

What are these tube radios that keep getting mentioned?

That's a 'murican thing. Over here (and in the motherland) they call them "Valves". Once upon a time there were no such thing as transistors and electricity was modulated using glass, tungsten, heat and the absence of air. Men were men and fixing a TV meant replacing the valve that wasn't glowing (or gently tapping each valve with a screwdriver handle until you found the one causing the symptoms).

In reality they are distortion generators. Highly prized by musicians (for their brand of distortion) and deluded audiophools who use them to listen to their vinyl in the "purest form" (again, it's distortion, but mainly of their sense of reality)

Don't get me wrong, I love my Vinyl, but I'm under no illusion that a Class A single Valve heater provides a cleaner and less distorted signal than any good semiconductor amplifier.

[Rbastler]

Damn, you all startend really young with electronics. In some sense I feel old, because I started with 13 years. Before that I watched my Dad repair tube radio (they got my interested in electronics and later bevame a rather big part of it). I also took stuff apart, mostly in a destructive way... I was about 8-9 then.
With 13 years I finally got my fist soldering iron and desoldered parts from a printer PSU. I build mostly blinking circuits, tone generators(that mad my parents go crazy), small audio amps, shortwave radios and various tiny circuits.
About two years later I started to play with HV from TV line Transformers. Nothing but arcing around and building some more or less sucessfull plasma speekers.
When I was around 16 years, I build my first Vakuum tube AMP. That stuff got me hooked. Probably since I was 8. Then I made my way through various tube circuits, repaired tube radios and a TV from the 60s. Nothing much, if at all was done with semiconductors.
After changing school, I worked much more with them. The first self designed circuits were build and the Theorie became more interesting and important.
Over time I had aquired some gear and parts. That continuied, more stuff came in and circuits got more complex and better designed. Now Im studiyng EE and have a decent lab with parts and gear. Mostly working on semiconductor projects now, rather then some with tubes. But now end then I will build something with tubes. Like the headphone AMP last weekend.

Edit: typo

[Alex Nikitin]

What are these tube radios that keep getting mentioned?

Tubes...a.k.a. Vacuum Tubes, Valves, electron tube <-- These things were used in the old day. They got replaced with the transistors, integrated circuits and todays microcontrollers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube

I work for a company which makes a piece of equipment still using a vacuum valve/tube in a place where nothing else works (at least not for long)   .

On the thread subject. I've started probably when I was 11-12, and by the time I was 15, I was in apprenticeship to a very good electronics engineer. I've built my first amplifier (a version of the JLH Class A) when I was 16 and my first oscilloscope when I was 17. I remember reading books with data on transistors and valves as if it was the best fiction.

Cheers

Alex

[sean87]

Hmmm when I was around 12 I got a 4-LED blinking kit and a soldering iron as a birthday gift...then I stuck in kits....eventually got into computer science and software development in university but I still do electronics. Too bad I do not have a brain for Analog electronics so I always suck

[bjcuizon]

If you are wondering what *everyone's* first circuit is; how they started; and what age they first got into electronics, you might want to look here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/what-was-your-first-circuit-do-you-still-remember-it/

Alright,..so I started when I was 8 years old. I bought some parts and built a blinking led circuit that would react depending on the audio input. Yeah! It was really fun!

[Rbastler]

I work for a company which makes a piece of equipment still using a vacuum
 I've built my first amplifier (a version of the JLH Class A) when I was 16 and my first oscilloscope when I was 17. I remember reading books with data on transistors and valves as if it was the best fiction.

Cheers

Alex

Where is a tube still used today ? Is it a microphone, some wired HF stuff or high power application ?
My first tube amp was a mono single ended el84 with a ef80/800 as pre amp.
I build scope with tubes a bit later, but i dismantled it, because i realized later how much it sucked. But it did work!

[bd139]

High power RF amplifiers still seem to use tubes. Also don't forget your microwave technically uses a vacuum tube (magnetron). Oh and guitar amps.

[Insatman]

1977.  I got a job fixing cable TV boxes.  Prior to that I only read about it and did basic electrical wiring or audio stuff.  After some years I got a job in an R&D oriented company as a technician.  35 years later I retired as a Pulsed Power Physicist.  Prior to that I was the senior EE in the company.   I was a long road...lots of memories.   Now I just play in my home lab.