Anyone want to share how they got into electronics?

[IonizedGears]

I came across EEVblog #54 video and this made me wonder about the background of many people on this forum. Care to share?

Here is my story so far as i am only 15.
I started out by taking this apart when i was little (5-8 years old) including those expensive 2000 dollars CRT computers because for some reason they would always fail each time my family of 5 got a whack at them and they would just sit in the basement collecting dust so i took them apart and me not being that knowledgeable at that age since i had no help from any magazines, internet, or basic help from people i would always completely destroy any possible salvage. I regret that completely by the way since i believe they could have been salvaged had i been more careful. I would continue doing that and when i became around 9 i started making a few things with still really no help at all ( i only started to get help at around 10 from the internet. I got into programming but i forgot a lot of that due to lack of using it that much but i still program a little java and c and assembly. I started formal school on electronics at 14 at my current tech. high school and i am the most knowledgeable in this area compared to my class and i never struggle with the current curriculum due to me doing research most of my time.  Now my class is on function gens, and oscilloscopes and i am still breezing through so much that much teacher kind of hates how the questions i ask confuse everyone else due to being more advanced and what not. I am planning to go to college for a masters in engineering once i graduate from my high school. I am currently transitioning to a much bigger room which i am turning into a lab / bedroom. I am also collecting components and equipment too and even adding a built in fume extractor for work that would create a lot of smoke IE soldering and pcb etching.

[Lightages]

It was a simple beginning for me. When I was 2 or 3, I began to stick anything metallic into wall sockets to watch the sparks. When I was 11 my uncle gave me my first multimeter, which I still have today, and a Weller soldering gun.

[jaqie]

My mother used to tell me of the little girl that always took everything apart and cut the power cords off of everything.  This was the early 1980s.  I went to summer computer camp which used lego logo with apple II computers, and I was hooked.  I got myself a TRS-80 model III used and taught myself the TRSDOS language, built single player yahtzee game on it, and many more programs... the TRS-80 broke and I tried fixing it... failed, but that got me started.

[steve30]

I think I started by connecting 6V and 12V lamps and switches up to the spare motorbike batteries that my farther kept in the garage .

I was originally more interested in computers, but then I got into electronics, and then managed to combine the two.

[free_electron]

I have an u cle that is also in electronics. He would sit at my grandparents fixing the tv ( tubes.. This is 1975 or so ) . One day he was building a radio tuner. As a six year old this fascinated me. He 'glued'( i didnt know what solder was, to me that was hot glue) parts together en there was music.
After coming home that night i tore apart a little pocket radio to see what made it tick. This was one of these first japanese all transistor radios that still had an output transformer. It was full of colorful coils with screw you could turn. So i happily started turnong away , completely destroying it....

My parents thought it would be better not to let me ruin working stuff so they got me one of those 100-in-1 electronics kits from radio shack. The rest is history...

[houdini]

i asked for an arduino and some components for my 15th birthday and it went from there.  I allready knew how to program at that point and i found i liked bright lights and such so i built an led cube and stuff.  I also annoyed my electronics teacher.  These are capacitors they arent dangerous and wont ever explode. Yea right.

[ptricks]

It was around 1980 when a local ham radio guy started showing me how the radio worked and then helped me build a crystal radio. I was amazed how it could work without a battery and started to learn from him how it all worked. That started my quest to learn all the electronics I could.

If you ever want to learn more about electronics seek out your local ham radio guys, even when you think you know it all they know so much more.

[IonizedGears]

Nice backgrounds.

[smashedProton]

I built a shitty computer from parts when I was around 12 years of age because I could not afford to buy a readymade one.  When looking at the motherboard, I saw a curious looking component that I have never seen before.  (what I now know as a watch crystal).  I ended up searching up that component, and all of the other jellybean electronic components.  When I had enough money saved up, I bought as much as I could afford.  Fast forward 5 obsessive years and now I have an adequate sized lab that is as complete as most people here. However, when I was fifteen, I took a detour from the hobby.  I got into high voltage electronics.  The dark side     Looking back, I am probably lucky to be alive.  I was really doing dumb stuff; ZVS drivers, Cockroft walton multipliers, and a tesla coil.  Now, I'm studying the grey area between analog and digital.  Its really fascinating

[G7PSK]

I was about twelve when we moved into a big old house (over 30 rooms) in the attic I found an old but unused and still in its box cat's whisker and crystal in a glass tube with brass mountings. i did not know what it was so asked my father who told me about the old crystal sets, he helped me build a crystal radio from it winding the coil by hand and salvaging the other hardware, from there I discoverd the crystal set would only drive headphones so I had to learn to build an amplifier and as they say the rest is history.

[FenderBender]

Cool stories guys. I guess we are all very similar. Most of us seemed to have started of small by taking things apart etc.

I was always big into building computers. All plug and play stuff. Easy shmeezy.

So I came to the point where I pretty much knew everything about building computers...and I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to figure out WHY computers work. So I got some electronics books and went from there. It's been quite a journey so far.

[FenderBender]

I built a shitty computer from parts when I was around 12 years of age because I could not afford to buy a readymade one.  When looking at the motherboard, I saw a curious looking component that I have never seen before.  (what I now know as a watch crystal).  I ended up searching up that component, and all of the other jellybean electronic components.  When I had enough money saved up, I bought as much as I could afford.  Fast forward 5 obsessive years and now I have an adequate sized lab that is as complete as most people here. However, when I was fifteen, I took a detour from the hobby.  I got into high voltage electronics.  The dark side     Looking back, I am probably lucky to be alive.  I was really doing dumb stuff; ZVS drivers, Cockroft walton multipliers, and a tesla coil.  Now, I'm studying the grey area between analog and digital.  Its really fascinating

Same for me! 

[Sionyn]

grandfather was a gpo head engineer had lots of nice testgear 

[jancumps]

I visited an open day at our technical school when I was 12. That day I knew what I was going to study. I had to wait three more years because electronics studies start at the 4th year of our secondary school. I waited.

[helloworld922]

My earliest memory of working with electronics was trying to fix the wiring for the lights in my grandpa's house... without turning off the power 

I started out mainly programming, I would write fun little games for my calculator (TI-83+ FTW) Looking back, it's kind of funny how similar that is to microcontroller programming. It wasn't really till college that I got more into electronics. My junior year we had to build robots and I got put in charge of the wiring and electronics. That was a fun project, but I really didn't do too much outside of class as far as electronics was concerned (I'm a Mech-E). Then my senior year I was put into the position of the electrical guy for wiring a race car almost last-minute, and enjoyed the project so much that I decided to continue working with electronics as a hobby. Now I'm on the eternal search for acquiring parts and equipment so I can build fun and useful circuits (kindly accepting donations to the helloworld922 is poor fund).

[smackaay]

Well, I got into it pretty late. I was a programming from the time I was child though and was writing games from the time I was about 6. It wasn't until about 6 years ago, when I was 27 or so that I started delving into electronics because while I had good experience in programming and I'm a journeyman machinist that I wanted to link the world of the digital and the world of the physical. So now I build machines, gages and instrumentation.

[andyturk]

My parents thought it would be better not to let me ruin working stuff so they got me one of those 100-in-1 electronics kits from radio shack. The rest is history...

I used to build those PBox kits from Radio Shack... I can't remember exactly what the kits were, but I'll never forget the smell of that red plastic burning from my poor attempts at soldering. Sometimes I'd get bored with the completed kit and tear it down it for parts to build something else.

I also had a scrapbook of sorts with cut-outs from the Jameco catalog of all the things I'd buy if I had the money.

[david77]

When I was a kid we would often visit good friends of my parents. The husband is an EE and has got the most amazing workshop in the basement. Rooms and rooms full of test gear and electrical junk. Their son is a few years older than me and he's got an amazing model railway setup in the attic of his parents house. It's a room of about 40m² filled with railways, computers, power supplies and so on.
When we visited them we would tinker away on this setup for hours and this is where I learned about electronics for the first time.
Also I took apart whatever I could get my hands on to see what made it work inside. My mum feared for everything that had a plug on it because I usually couldn't put things back together .
When I was 9 this EE gave me my first soldering iron and a soldering lesson for christmas.
For my 18th birthday he gave me my Hitachi V550 scope which I still use.

[PA0PBZ]

When I was about 10 years old I started to take things home that people put outside for garbage collection, like radio's, vacuum cleaners and anything with a power cord and portable for a 10 year old. After taking apart enough to fill a few shoeboxes I started wondering what I could do with my collection. Since this was the 60's there was nothing like internet, you young guys have no idea how lucky you are  I only had the library to read about tubes, transformers and resistors, my dad was a mechanical engineer and while he was very good at that he had no interest in electronics.
When I was 15 there was a ham radio presentation at my school, and I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to know more about, so I've been a ham since I was 18 (That was the minimum age at that time). At about the same time I found out about digital stuff, like the 7400 series of IC's. Now that was something different from tubes!
A bit later I started reading about computers, but had to go to trade shows to get my hands on it. I still have my "is this a prime number" program I wrote on a teletype machine on one of these shows. A bit later I bought a "KIM 1", a board with a 6502 processor, 1K of memory and a hex keyboard and display. I payed like $500, probably almost a year of newspaper delivery, and that teached me assembly programming the hard way.
My first job was repairing household equipment like radio's, tv's, washing machines and so on. Doing repairs at peoples homes is a hard learning school, with kids complaining that the tv is broken while the family dog is trying to eat your equipment case... I think that time really educated me in understanding how stuff works.
Today my day time job is IT, and the hobby is still electronics, programming and ham radio. I finally have the equipment I could only dream of when I was a teenager, and I still enjoy fixing stuff. Just started playing with FPGA's, and I'm sure when that gets boring there will be something else 

[Teneyes]

Here is my story so far as i am only 15.
"so much that much teacher kind of hates how the questions i ask confuse everyone else due to being more advanced and what not.

@IonizedGears, and beginners

Be carefull, you will probably get this line
"Only one thing worse than a Know-it-All that does NOT know it, and that is a Know-it-All that Knows It"

 Talk to instructors after the class, Offer to help teach the class, start special projects,
 get referred to after school electronic job.

For me, It started with plugging in things @2 , so my mother said.
Poor eye sight (600/20) so I had to visualize the world.
Ask Ma, "where do I plug in this rope.......
and like Dave "TAKE IT APART".

Family relied on me, and come back from College,
"oh Yeah, Teneyes you have to fix the Hot water"
as the shower went Freezing after 4 minutes

And many Shocking experiences:
    Striping wire with teeth, seen many blue stars on 110 Vac
     25,000 Vdc on Picture tube
     5Kv arc to finger on a 6GHz TWT
     100 W of SSB  burns deep
     220 Vac making me shaking on airducts alone at Satellite earth station
      I hit the emergency Oxygen after that one.

Stay open to the many and exciting areas to play in

[jaqie]

I pretty much knew everything about building computers...

nobody EVER knows everything about building computers.

I have been in the PC industry for at least 16 years, first as a hobby then a livelihood and now as an obsession as I am disabled and semi housebound.  There is just way too much for any one person to EVER know everything about building PCs.  And this is coming from someone that has worked on their hardware almost every waking hour for over 16 years.

I still learn things every day, just a week ago I learned that XT computers actually had two different ISA slot spacings, something I didn't know even though I worked on them when I started into PCs.

[Neilm]

I got into electronics when I found out I could give my little brother electric shocks using 2 AA cells and a small transformer. I was about 10

Neil

[FenderBender]

I pretty much knew everything about building computers...

nobody EVER knows everything about building computers.

I have been in the PC industry for at least 16 years, first as a hobby then a livelihood and now as an obsession as I am disabled and semi housebound.  There is just way too much for any one person to EVER know everything about building PCs.  And this is coming from someone that has worked on their hardware almost every waking hour for over 16 years.

I still learn things every day, just a week ago I learned that XT computers actually had two different ISA slot spacings, something I didn't know even though I worked on them when I started into PCs.

Not sure what you mean. All I am saying is that I got to a point where looking at press releases for new parts just became boring and blah for me so I looked for something new to learn about.

Essentially I had peaked. Sure, no one can ever know everything about anything, but for my intents, I wasn't going to learn too much more.

[smashedProton]

I agree.  There becomes a point that when learning all the wank words that the consumer pc industry uses is no longer interesting. Including all of the minor innovations that motherboard manufacturers blow out of proportion.  Did you know that gigabyte uses the standby 12v rail to power the usb ports so you can power your apple/raspberry/pear devices 24/7?  Hooray!  Free kitkats for everybody!

What I am trying to say, is that there becomes a point where little things on arduino are more fascinating than big sometimes expensive things for pc.

I love it how apple never came into the picture here   Love you guys

[FenderBender]

I got into electronics when I found out I could give my little brother electric shocks using 2 AA cells and a small transformer. I was about 10

Neil

You managed to make AC out of two AAs? Magic?