Hi all, I found the site by seeing Dave on youtube while searching for something. I clicked on it to see this really animated guy with an aussie accent and ended up watching a fair few videos
I have been a software and systems guy for all of my career but I have always had a lot of interests. My dad was an electrical engineer before he moved in to software so I grew up with all the smells and equipment which comes with that. Unfortunately dad moved in to software before I got to the age where I could really start to learn the fundamentals and my interest moved with him to computers. So while I could always put together kits like the pros I didn't aways understand why they worked. To a large extent that hasn't changed except I can understand what I am reading these days so the learning curve doest seem so steep.
About 5 years ago I bout an atmel avr development kit, the stk500. I was amazed how easy it seemed to do things with i2c busses etc. For a software engineer it seemed very plug and play and the electronics didn't seem like such a barrier. Then my boy arrived and I never did anything with it.
Then a little while ago I saw the arduino stuff and my interest has perked again but I have some specific projects to do this time around. I have ideas for telescope drive controllers, flight simulator panels, moving platforms for flight simulators. The arduino stuff seems to have made a lot of this even simpler than last time around. Probably because of the easy to use libraries for controlling servos/steppers/spi/i2c/ports etc.
I bought an uno but I plan to mount the chips on to my own pcb's. The other day I tried miling one on a cnc just to see how it would come out. Surprisingly well considering the cutter I used was not ideal.
I also spend a bit of time in the workshop with my metal and woodworking tools. The last electronics project I did was building some active speakers. I only had to populate the boards but there were two with lotsa things on them. You can see a pic of one of the boards here, how cool would it be to have the skills to design it
http://www.mydiversions.com/Site/Orion_Speakers.html Otherwise, most of my projects using electronics have been relegated to using 3rd party controllers to integrate my diy flightsim controllers.
I plan to use my workshop to create some nice (hopefully) things with good electronics. I want to make a simple telescope drive system and build a telescope mount for a small scope. Right now I have built my main telescope but I had purchased a mount to put it on. It's here.
http://gallery.me.com/jason.jane#100103/scopedone&bgcolor=black My most recently finished project which had a lot of wiring but using purchased electronics was my CNC machine. It's partly why I have a new interest in the electronics because it can really help me do the mechanical parts of project a lot more quickly than I could do before as well as make some things possible that were to time consuming in the past - like replica aircraft panels which require lots of electronics, albeit not too difficult. Here is that one done.
http://gallery.me.com/jason.jane#100055/dirtysmallshop&bgcolor=black My dads old oscilloscope it broken, bah, it was only 40mhz I think and looking around they are a lot cheaper, not necessarily in New Zealand, but that Rigol Dave is using looks very good, I must read up to see if the 'upgrade' is still possible on current versions.
Anyway, I will browse the forums and will most likely have more questions than answers but in the end I hope I can have a good mating between my software background, my workshop interests and microcontrollers
Thanks,
Jason
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