How did you get into electronics?

[Six]

Apologies if this has been covered before.

I'm a late starter (kind of) I've been involved in IT work with the army and later a Gulf based airline where I was responsible for the development of in-flight services. I'm also a massive gear head when it comes to pro audio and have been modding/ repairing/ using recording and live sound gear for years. I only recently got into designing my own kit and thought what the hell I really enjoy this so signed up for uni. (I wish I would have done it years ago!)

I'm in my second year now and have a placement at a major manufacturer where I help out in the workshop and generally annoy anyone that will answer my questions.

Great forum. I'm very happy to be here!

Cheers!

Six

[NiHaoMike]

My dad took me to his workplace when I was in 1st grade, at which point I asked for a board to play with. Soon afterwards, he got me an electronics kit for my birthday and that's how it all started.

[c4757p]

when I was in 1st grade ... electronics kit for my birthday and that's how it all started.

Easier to copy from you. 

[MacAttak]

The first time? Or the second time? 


The first time was when I was a pre-teen... probably 9 or 10. My dad needed some stuff from Radio Shack to hook up our new Sony BetaMax deck  O0, and while he was figuring all that out I wandered into the part of the store with all of the small components - and was fascinated by it. I had no idea what any of it did. And then I spotted a bunch of these little books... written on graph paper. They were only a few dollars each, so I talked my dad into buying them for me (it was all of the classic Mims notebooks that were so awesome for their time). My dad happened to work as a clerk at a small electricians supply company, so within a few weeks I had a soldering iron, multimeter, a handful of discrete parts, a breadboard, and an unstoppable desire to strip down any and every piece of electronic equipment I could get my hands on - just to figure out how it worked. Not all of it was broken before I got my hands on it - but afterwards it sure as hell was! Every week he would bring home some new parts for me to tinker with. Usually mains-voltage stuff, but sometimes it was low-voltage parts too. Pretty much whatever surplus gear happened to show up at his workplace.

But by the time I reached high school, "being cool" was more important and I forgot all about the electronics stuff. I went to college for a few years and eventually made a cozy career in software engineering / consulting. I've been doing that for almost the past 20 years.


The second time was when I started to frequent Kickstarter, which I joined to sign up for a cool video game I had heard about. And I kept seeing all these projects related to "arduino this" and "arduino that" and "digispark" and "tinyduino" and "netduino". And eventually I got curious enough to go find out what they heck these people were talking about... and then realized just how far DIY electronics had come since my days of struggling to get a 555 timer circuit working to drive a piezo speaker. It was shocking to me. You could effectively get an entire computer (well, a microcontroller) in this tiny hackable form factor - and you could wire up your own hardware to it! Even just driving an LED with software was impressive to me... I was hooked and it wasn't long (days) before I had started building back up a serious workbench and was doing little soldering practice projects and learning everything I could again about circuit theory and all the various semiconductor parts. Of course this time I could actually afford to buy real equipment like a bench PSU, scope, DMM, hot air station, a good iron, vise and magnifier arm, and whatever other tools I needed.

That was late last year and I haven't slowed down at all. I've tinkered with direct AVR programming, taught myself several PCB and schematic packages, designed and fabricated small PCB projects, and built a bunch of micro-robots. Now I am getting my hands dirty with repair work - attempting to fix our very expensive home sound system which has 3 out of 6 channels blown. Salvaging it will save a good $700 or more. And I am also getting into FPGA design... something of a natural fit for me as it sits in between hardware and software.

Very happy to have rediscovered my childhood hobby.

[steve30]

I think initially it started by me connecting random little indicator lamps via switches up to my Dad's 6V motorbike batteries which he kept in the garage.

[poorchava]

Genetics & fate: my parents met each other in HAM radio club.
My mom is an energetics engineer and my dad is a physicist...

[The_PCB_Guy]

I started when I was very young--around 5 or 6 years old--when I took apart one of my sister's toys to try to fix it after it stopped working. I was always messing with batteries and light bulbs and simple electromagnets, but it didn't get serious until I was about 11 years old. I saw my first Tesla Coil, and I remember thinking to myself, "I gotta build me one of those!". After that it got closer and closer to becoming a career, rather than a hobby. I went to college for Electronic Engineering Technology, where I studied more aspects of small electronics (analog/digital systems, semiconductors, ICs, etc). I became an electronics lab assistant at a school in Boston (where I am now), but I'm currently looking to move on to a better job that is more suited to my interests and expertise. PCB design and assembly is really my thing, but I have yet to find a company hiring in that field 

Matt

[vlf3]

I appear to have been born to it ?, can't remember a time when experimenting started, but recall I was about eight... playing with motors and electromagnets, also crystal sets; above all at this age, I remember making a model of a building lift, basic bare bones style onto a section of wood; with the car riding up and down, with four stop levels and would show an indicator at each floor... the whole lift driven by a simple geared motor and reversible switch system; so the lift moved up and down automatically... in time I moved onto valves, transistors, and IC's as I grew-up.

However, I wanted a career in the navy but, for reasons best known to the Navy ? I was rejected; so transitioned
directly into electronic engineering as a career, until that English female politician  decided to sell the industry.

[babysitter]

Father working at phone company, taking me to work sometimes since I was small. Fabulous "KOSMOS" electronics construction kit (X Series) during school.
 

[nuhamind2]

I found my dad electronic book at age 12. I remember I learn things like bridge rectifier and comparison of transistor and vaccum tube from that book. My dad then bought me flip-flop transistor kit. Not working after i soldered it, mainly because I didn't know which transistor pin went to which hole. The book say one of the pin (Collector maybe ?) has mark on it, but what mark ? That almost got me frustated.

[madshaman]

Was going to go into a long history, childhood, hiatus, adulthood renaissance.

Like probably 99% of the people here, the real answer is, it was destiny coming out the womb.  It's the closest thing to magic that exists in the objective world.

Who wouldn't want to play with the fundamental force of nature that has the most impact in every part of our daily world, from digestion to virtual reality.

[americanhacker1]

I got into electronics in pretty normal way I think when I was little i would just grab anything that beeped or blinked and i would examine it once i got to be about 7 or 8 i began to t use screw drivers and take everything electronic related apart it was a habit of mine and is to this day i don't mind it but to others especially my family i was a a pain in their rear i was always told to not touch this and not touch that but that never stopped me to this day i still take things apart ive just gotten better at it and i tend to repurpose electronics nowadays electronics are my passion nothing can compare to the feeling i get when m told i can have something to take apart its just the greatest, but these days im on my highschools robotics team its some of the most fun ive ever had,well i hope to hear from you guys on how you have gotten into electronics 

[Eviltech]

Was going to go into a long history, childhood, hiatus, adulthood renaissance.

Like probably 99% of the people here, the real answer is, it was destiny coming out the womb.  It's the closest thing to magic that exists in the objective world.

Who wouldn't want to play with the fundamental force of nature that has the most impact in every part of our daily world, from digestion to virtual reality.

Same story, with the exption that our cat got slightly electricuted a few times by the washing machine "Perla 05" that we had. Every time it was looking in the window at the tumbling clothes it's rear feet were twiching like it was dancing I was interested why this was the only thing in the house that tickled when touched

[Strada916]

I started out by pulling electric motors out of anything I could find. And then convincing my perants to buy me a 6V lantern battery. I then got hold of some 300ohm TV antenna ribbon and connected the battery from one side of the room through the ribbon cable and then on to a electric motor. The ribbon was in my mind then the transmition cables from the street. I hung the cable from anything in the room to act as a power pole.

I then started taking thinkgs apart and putting them back to gether and making sure they always worked again. I think at that stage I was about 8 or 9.
A few years later I got a Birthday present that had a DSE volume 2 kit. Inside was the book a FM transmitter and a 240v mains constant heat iron. Once I built this I found out about Talking Electronics http://www.talkingelectronics.com/index.html and there FM bugs series. And many more kits to come after that. I also purchased a PSU kit 30V 1A. (ETI design).
From high school I went to TAFE to study electronics. I never ventured into electronics as a job. but thats a another story.

[jamesp15]

When I was 8 or 9 I damaged some of my grandfathers radio gear..  He jokingly told me that since I broke them it was up to me to fix them now, so I took them (much to his surprise) and spent a few weeks learning all I could about them and then managed to fix them.  He was so impressed that he gave me a bunch of his spare test gear and such and from then on I kept at it as a hobby.  Eventually turned to "real" work in my mid 20's and have been doing repair/maintenance ever since along with a computer obsession. 

My friends and family wont let me near their new electronics/etc...  I had a bad habit of taking anything and everything apart that I could get my hands on "just to take a look".  Though I am the first they come to when something goes tits-up on them.

[lemmegraphdat]

When I was probably seven or eight years old I broke open an old radio and pulled out the parts with a pair of pliers. I stuck them on a piece of cardboard and just twisted the leads together. Then I hooked the thing to a C cell but nothing happened. I was hoping to set the thing on fire at least.

[Hardcorefs]

4 or 5 , my father was an electrical engineer with Granada, he discovered that cable runs were a lot easier if you could shove a kid under the floor spaces.
It was an education, but today some would call it child abuse, I loved it.
 I also learned to read from electrical handbooks and wireman's manuals
 They had these fantastic hardback sets that opened out, with lift out shiny paper sheets covering three phase supplies and pictures of how to install these massive mercury rectifiers for hospitals etc

[wsmartAnn]

I dun know about elentronic in my child , still now ,i come into a city ,found there major business all about electronics , and then i menber in it and  loving it  , i think always boys  like electronics morr than girl's .   

[jpb]

I joined the electronics club at school, it was run by the French teacher so it was mainly building things (simple circuits like flip-flops) and not much on theory. In those days (mid 70s) it was all discrete stuff, I remember one of the electronics magazines ran a construction project for building a calculator out of logic gates. It went on for months and had dozens of ics all to produce something that now you can buy for £2!

It was a lot of fun, and it decided me to do electronics at university. I then ended up working on microwave integrated circuits and devices in GaAs, it was interesting stuff but it wasn't really electronics in the sense of building circuits with a soldering iron. I used network analysers costing half a million pounds but didn't use oscilloscopes. Most of what I did was on a computer. It is very different doing things for a living to having fun building circuits for yourself.

I shifted to device physics and then moved into computer science where I am now.

Now, nearly four decades on I'm rediscovering the fun side doing electronics as a hobby.

[brizleciderarmy]

When i was about 3 i 'discovered' what a screwdriver was. As a result my mum used to find screws missing from everything, EG: door handles, chairs etc. When i was about 4 i was caught taking apart some of my toys (think it might of been a keyboard) and from then on i was fascinated with circuit boards.

My mum used to give me old radios when they broke to muck about with.  When i was about 6, my step dad gave me the old telly that no longer worked to pull apart. Knowing what i know, i wouldn't let my kids near the insides of a CRT telly, let alone with wire cutters. Ignorance taught him that once its unplugged it must be safe.

Being 6 i couldn't work out why the HV cable that comes from the tube fizzed when it was cut.

I am more wiser nowadays of course