New Member, Please introduce yourself

[FrankMc]

Hi Guys

I,m Frank a sparkie living in Melbourne...Came across Dave,s Blog from a link on a U.S.  sparkie Forum....

 Been doing electronics as a hobby since i was an apprentice ...Dabble with PIC micros, programming in asm a little picbasic pro and lately have used  a program which converts ladder logic to pic code....

Frank

[N5XL]

Hello to all from hot and sunny Phoenix, AZ.  Self taught electronics hobbyist and amateur radio operator for 26 years.

73 de N5XL ..

[WattSekunde]

Hello around the globe and maybe beyond... 

I am an electronic hobbyist since... I was 5 Years old and I disassembled a small 3V electrical motor from a toy and think to myself... "1.5V battery = to slow"... "9V battery = nice fast"... "220V main power plug in the wall = That has to be really fast!" ***booom***  - Yes I did it with the cables from the multimeter of my father. Some croco clips on one motor side and the perfect fitting banana clips into the wall.   

Little later I started with a breadboard and some parts from my father in the early 80's. He is an electronic engineer, too. So, as a child I had a great resource of a wide range of sample components. My first contact to logic ICs was CMOS and not TTL like others around me, because my father used only CMOS on his projects. I loved the low power for battery powered projects and the low voltage range and had never ever problems with electro static discharge on my CMOS chips. I dreamed of building my own CPU...

My first computer contact was the Motorola MEK6802D5 evaluation board. With this thing I've learned what a computer really is from ground up. I soldered some circuits with LEDs etc. on it and writing the code direct into it via the HEX keyboard & display. Later I controlled my lego motors with it.


BTW in germany you always have to make some sort of paper if you want to get a chance to work on interesting jobs. So I have studied electronic engineering and computer science and - yes, worked on some interesting things... (680x, 680xx, inmos Transputer, motorola PPC, PIC, ...  )

In my private workshop I use mostly the nice Hameg Analog/Digital 1507-3.



And an old TES 2360 LCR Multimeter. I saw now on google and can't believe it's under construction until today for around 100$. I don't really know - but mine is more than 10 maybe 15(!) Years old! Unbelievable. Sometimes I have to by a Gossen-Metrawatt to check if it needs a calibration .

@Dave. I'd love to see a tear down of the TES 2360 because it's full of old PCBs, DILs, etc.   


In my very little free time I love to hack things HW/SW and build, rebuild, restore, and play synthesizer. (www.ambientcircle.de)




Thank you Dave for your always inspiring EEVblog!

Michael (WattSekunde)

[pablo]

Hello my name is Pablo. I'm an electronics technician but i also have a degree in Electronics Engineering.
Im planning to get a decent lab with pretty every conceivable test gear a technician/engineer could have.

[joey80]

The web site is quite great, keep writing good information.

[Ged]

I'm not new to electronics, but haven't really had anything to do with the field in just over 20 years (US Navy).  I have wanted to get back into electronics as a hobbyist for a long time and have recently begun to stick my toes back into the water (so to speak).  I have started to self-study with the NEETS modules.  For those familiar with it, yes, I know the material is long and dry, but it does seem to be indepth (even more than I remember) as well as free.

As for my involvement here on the forum, I will mostly be needing the help of the members, but I will also contribute where I can.

Dave, I love your blog.  It has been so helpful.  Thank you!  My 5 yr old daughter has watched some of the video blogs with me.  She likes you and loves to say "Don't turn it on, TAKE IT APART!!!"  She makes me laugh every time!

[cursohistoria2011]

Hello everyone I am from Mexico city and I am new to the forum I have no experience in electronic parts but I want to learn

[zetan]

Hi,

My name is Olivier and I am an electrical engineering student at École Polytechnique de Montréal in Québec, Canada. I'm almost over with my bachelor degree and I presently work as a programmer at Ubisoft Montréal.

I recently finished to setup a basic electronic lab in my apartment. The main tools are a Metcal Sp200 soldering station, a homemade power supply (-5V,5V,3.3V,-12V,12V) built from an ATX supply, a homemade double side UV lightbox, a BK Precision 3010 function generator and a brand new Atten 100MHz ADS1102CML (7 inch display, 1 Gsa/s, 2 Msa per channel: a real beauty). I am now waiting for the delivery of my new SMD hot air rework station.

I am mostly interested in robotic electronics. Power stages and control circuitry.

See you,

Olivier

[WanaGo]

Hello

My name is James, I am located in New Zealand, and I am an Industrial Automation Engineer. I deal with PLC/SCADA/HMI at work, however did a Mechatronics Engineering Degree 6 years ago and have been dabbling with Electronics since I was a lad. I am only just getting to the stage now of being able to afford some decent equipment, so am currently on the hunt for a Oscilloscope.
I dabble a bit with Arduino's also, however have used AVR's for a while before I came across the Arduino platform. This is a current project of mine if anyone is interested - http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,61643.0.html
Always happy to be corrected so I can learn, and have some serious reading to do on the Oscilloscope front too.

Cheers
James

[hannobisschoff]

Hi everyone, my name is Hanno and I'm from South Africa. I feel very bad saying I'm still just in high school, since this blog seems like a place where the pro's hang out. But this is one of the best ways I learn. I don't want to offend anyone, so I will just keep to myself and occasionally ask a stupid newbie question, and give my humble opinion. I look forward to learning a lot with the members of this blog.

[pklawit]

Hello,

My name is Piotr.
I'm from Poland. I'm working for one of the biggest telco companies for 15 years now.
At job I'm a technical support engineer, helping our customers to manage their POTS, VoIP and IP
equipment.
But what really turns me on is my hobby - microcontrollers.
I have started with Z80 years ago and via all Atmel chips (yes, I love Atmel chips, not the PICs ;-)
I came finally to the ARM core based micros.

When I was working with all the "small bugs", I always wanted to have some kind of remote access,
some operating system on it etc.
Now, with the Linux on ARM boards I have all of this, but how do you manage the I/O lines?
This is really re-inventing wheel - let this be a warning for others guys dreaming about embedded linux.

I do not have a brilliant/featured lab, like Dave has, but this is my plan for retirement :-)
For now one simple bench power supply, simple DMM and Rigol DS1052 is enough for me.

Greetings,
Piotr

[lameiro]

Hi,

My name is Ricardo, I am from Portugal and I am a Musician. I studied before college electronics, but now it is kind of my hobby.
I am interested in interface phisical world with electronics and use it on musical / artistic performances.

my identi.ca handle is @rlameiro  twitter is @ricardolameiro

bye

[CyberWalker]

Hello to everyone! 

This is Ioannis, I am 30 years old and a post-graduate student with a degree in "Electronic and Computer Engineering Department" of the Technical University of Crete/Greece.

My hobby has been electronics since I was at the age of 8, so I kinda always knew what I wanted to become when I grow up!

I have developed quite frankly some dozens of really nice projects since then but a have kept only a small portion for myself. Most of them were donated to my friends or have been "TAKEN APART" just to re-construct them into something new! I have the strongest childhood memories from the times that I had to construct the mechanical part of the equipment with only a bunch of trivial tools and ratty materials!
These were the best times for me because I had to invent sophisticated and witty designs to overcome all kind of problems, mainly electro-mechanical in nature.

My closest friends from HighSchool used to call me either a crazy-scientist or 'Gyro the Gearloose', like the Disney duck!, which they sometimes meant is a rather befooling way but I didn't mind! I took pride in all my little effort for success... I knew that after a great 'boom' comes a great 'wow!!!' 

[Pickers]

Hello all,

My name is Kris and I'm from the UK! Electronics has been a major hobby of mine as far back as I remember, I started off with one of those simple safety electronics kits and went from there! Designed and built a few simple circuits and restored a load of vintage kit. I'm currently looking to expand my knowledge and gain the qualifications necessary to advance my career and hobby a bit. I've decided to go to university and study electronic engineering with the hope to get me on the right path to a decent job... Well that and to justify the purchase of some nice kit for my workshop :-).

Cheers
Kris.

[Vertigo]

Hi, i'm just starting electronics as a hobby and found this place via youtube.
i'm into tabletop robotics and i want to build some BEAM robots to begin with.
since i cant find any real active forums on that, i hope to chat with some other
BEAM makers on here.

[westfw]

My name is Bill Westfield.  I'm an EE by education (BSEE UPenn), but have spent the last 30 years or so doing software development for the computer networking industry, mostly at the relatively low level.  More recently I retired and have been attracted to Arduino and similar "educational products"; I've currently taken up the task of supporting the Arduino project's copy of the optiboot bootloader firmware, and plan to do a bunch of similar small things that don't involve many layers of beaurocracy and pain...

One of my goals in is to get FTDI's Vinculum 2 chip to do interesting things.  It pisses me off that I can get BT or 802.11 for $10 for my laptop (USB connection) but a theoretically simply device to talk SPI to my microcontroller is 5 to 10 times more expensive.  Grr.  Vinculum 2 looks like it might be able to help fix that, but FTDI seems to be hiding details of how things work.  That may put it right up my alley/skillset.  squeezing results out of obscure and poorly documented hardware.  Yeah.

I was WestfW back in college (first 5 letters of your last name, first letter of your first name, standard algorithm.)  WestfW@Wharton-10  Later I was billw@mit-xxx (guest account) billw@sri-kl.arpa, billw@simtel20.msmr.army.mil, billw@score.stanford.edu, (and etc), and then billw@cisco.com for a LONG time.  But "billw" was popular out in the real world, and was already take on most of the public email systems, so I settled for going back to WestfW, which seems to have pretty good search properties!

[DevilMKD]

Hi,
My name is Goran and I am an electrical engineering student, I have just finished my high school, and now I'm going to apply for an university.
I am mostly interested in PIC microcontrollers.
Now I'm design an DDS signal generator with PIC16F887 control, but first I need to repair my PicKit2
See you,
Goran

[gregariz]

I'm Greg,

I've been watching the EEVblog for a few months on and off now. I'm 37 and suspect not too different in age/background to Dave. I also grew up in Australia and read most of the same mags (ETI, AEM and EA), having been a hobbyist since primary school. Unlike Dave I grew up in the sticks so most of my attention was paid to radio's and how to design them and improve performance. I must have built at least a hundred kits between primary school and high school including just about every funway kit in the books plus a bunch of magazine, tandy and talking electronics bugs. In my teenage years I then moved on to the Microbee.

At Uni I concentrated back on the radio side and stayed in Uni for too long ending up with a PhD in RF. I then moved to the US as I found the job situation in Australia a little poor for what I was doing - either that or I was overqualified by then. Now I live and work as a practicing engineer in Arizona but am still a radio and electronics hobbyist nut, keeping a lab at home and tinkering most days, so I guess I'm proof that you can be academic, practical and a hobbyist, so never fear!

Anyways, thanks to Dave for this forum, its good to see so many passionate about electronics.

[Semantics]

Hello, I'm a 31 year old from Florida, USA. My formal education was in Comp. Science which makes me a software guy as my primary class. I've been attracted to hardware and software as a kid and I just plain didn't have the space for getting serious into hardware. As a kid I've built and played with electronics kits and did some very basic wiring stuff with arcade boards and computer hardware but that was about as far as I got. Now that I'm older I wanted to revisit that part of me and, well, with electronics information so much more accessible today than 21 years ago (and the square footage to get real equipment) now's as good a time as any!

[Madman]

Hi Dave and all members of the forum,

I am Pierre, aka Madman, from Switzerland. I am a full-time trainer for traffic controllers. My other interests include modelling, watch making, photography and motor biking. I was a real dummy in electronics until I discovered Dave's blog. This triggered a resolution to become less dumb, and that's why I am here. Please do not kick me out immediately, I promise to learn quickly.

I will start by reading though your recent posts, and find an appropriate place to show you my workbench.

Best regards to all,
- Pierre Madman

[Dataforensics]

Hello, my name is Tony. For the last 25 years I have been employed in computer forensics. Before that it was elecronics/radio research and development. I am trying to re-kindle my interest in electronics and even perhaps start using my amateur radio callsign again. First off I need to repair my oscilloscope rescued from my loft.

Tony G8KLR

[vk6zgo]

Hi Tony,
I hope you do become active in Amateur Radio again,as it is still a lot of fun,even for OFs like myself.
What brand/model of Oscilloscope do you have?

Bryan VK6ZGO

[Precisiontools]

Hi all

Have been in the electronics game for about 22 years. First as a tech, then development and now looking into some new things. Found Dave's vids interesting and entertaining so now here we are!

Cheers.

[Retro]

Just saying Hi..

[kwkarth]

Greetings everyone, from sunny Oregon, USA!
Dave, I saw one of your VBlogs and liked your style.  I've been a lifelong nerd, mostly interested in audio electronics and acoustics.
I am semi-retired.  I spent many years in the Television Engineering group of a famous T&M instrument manufacturer of yesteryear, and several years managing an engineering group for the world's largest uprocessor manufacturer.  I worked for a time for a world famous cable manufacturer as their headphone and digital life products manager.  I am active in the headphone audio world through various manufacturers and through the "head-fi.org" forums.

I'm looking forward to spending time on your forums and to your forthcoming VBlogs.

Cheers!
kw