I started w/ a TRS 80 Model 3 with two floppy drives.  Programmed basic on it to create a dungeon and dragons random dungeon generator.  Followed that with the commodore 128 (mostly 64 mode) and then onto the PC.  I have worked witha  number of different platforms, from i860 embedded networking, to network specific processors (C5) to your standard pentium based systems running Linux.  From the application level to the embedded bit banging level and most everywhere between.   Most recently I have been working with arduino, pi, and beaglebone to do various projects.  My current focus is automated aquarium monitoring using a beaglebone.

Around the early 80's, I was given some computer stuff IE. Atari 800, ti99, commodore 64.  Not knowing anything about them, I started plugging away to see what they could do.  At the same time, had the privilege to receive copies of the DOS operating source code while living in the South Bay Area in San Jose.  While at the time, we all were just kids just messing around.  After a while it became an obsession in trying to make the machines do more by outputting to different devices and registering the voltages outputs to do things like: turn on lights and more in evolved stuff like voice input output control.  Memory was always the only thing holding us back at the time due to most of the machines only had up to 48 to 64kb to work with.  After I graduated school, I decided to continue my education in Washington State, University of Washington.  I will have to admit that most of my electronics and programming languages I have acquired have been self taught.

I can remember my first program I wrote when I was 11 years old was changing the screen all sorts of colors with line programming.  That really dates me but it was fun as a young boy.  My parents did not know what to think about what I was doing due to the complexity of it all for them. What what makes it all the more interesting was to learn out side of class.  Learning ASM at the time was a must because most of the programming at that time was Fortran, Cobol, ASM, Pascal, and of course Basic .  Even to date ASM has been the key to programming in my view due to it is the level of the hardware control. 

As it is, here i am still plugging away with all the newer languages Java, Android, C# and the list goes on.  I feel that if a person was interested in creating, building, and just having fun in the labs.  Electronics will never let you down.  There is always new and exciting devices that can be built and or rebuilt.  I have a collection in my shop of old electronics that i still use parts off today.

I continue to support the community and others around me to help and suggest the engineering field as one of the most interesting innovating fields out there in the market today.  I hope to see more kids these days out there in the field working on a brighter future where some day we make the sky bluer and less gray.

For me it came from the desert that surrounded our neighborhood growing up.  People we always dumping stuff out there from appliances to old stereos, to broken bikes.  I'd haul some of the more interesting bits back home and start taking them apart to figure out how they worked.  Despite some sparks and other surprises some of it slowly started to make sense.  Eventually I was able to get a little FM clock radio working again by cutting an obviously burned capacitor off the board and finding a matching on in my pile of junk - literally twisted the stubby leads together just enough to get it working - and I was hooked. Being able to bring something back to life that my parents didn't even understand was great for a kid.  Not long after that, we got our first computer: an Apple IIe that covered the dining room table with boards and cables and such that we had to connect together to get working.  I was fascinated and spent my afternoons learning ProDOS and Basic and spent the first several weeks saving on program per disk with "INIT" because I hadn't discovered the "SAVE" command yet.   Through modifying solenoids to shoot nails Junior High, building HeNe laser shows in high school, teaching tanks to play laser tag in my first job, and other adventures that have continued throughout my career I've been hooked.

     Thinking back to my earlier years, I was destined to be an engineer. I was a loner and preferred books over sports. Some of the gifts for birthdays were a computer in plastic with 3 bit of 0/1's and a radio shack 50 in 1 electronics kit. I can remember books on sub atomic particles and hot flux over magnetic poles creating electric currents. By the time six grade arrived, I was understanding imaginary numbers and other high powered mathematics.I became more social only later in life with much difficulty. Chess was a distraction from a life of school and homework. My first computer class was in high school along with calculus which was both a real challenge. The odd thing was getting elected to the prom attendants which was weird for such a geeky pencil carrying guy with a pocket protector. I can even used the slider ruler before the TI calculator. Life was moving fast and I found the ground floor in computers. At the university I even got a part time job in the computer center as a systems programmer. What a great learning that was. So really the progression was natural fit for me. Thanks for reading my post and I hope you get bitten by the bug in whatever career fits your personality. Mine was surely engineering!

The short answer to how I became involved in technology, electronics and tinkering is my father.  As a small child Dad was always tinkering with some electronic gizmo in our basement "lab".  At the time my brother, myself and my father were all ham radio operators.  Dad spent a lot of time building and proving out transmitters and receivers.  He instilled that interest in me whether he intended to or not.  The first electronics that I built was a Knight kit T-60 transmitter when I was about 12 years old. (To those who know what this is I have revealed my age.)

Electrical engineering became my profession as well as my relaxation interest.  I tell friends that I learned most of my engineering from my dad and went to school to pick up the underlying math.  I believe this to be true.  My dad passed away a few years ago just short of his 87th birthday but up until the end he was tinkering with computers, NetBeans Java and Windows .NET code.  He was always interested in how things worked.

I'm retired now and have more time to hack and tinker. I love it and fill many hours with creating simple Android applications, Java apps on both the Eclipse and NetBeans IDE's. In the last couple weeks I acquired a Raspberry Pi starter kit.  I look forward to learning new things and encouraging my grand children to hack and tinker and pursue their dreams.

Thanks for the opportunity to tell you how I got started.

Paul Weisgerber

Well I've always had a little bit of the bug crawling around me, but wasn't totally bitten with it until recently after I turned 30. When I was a kid, I got my start programming on the Atari ST520E and the Amiga 500. I've always done a little bit of electronics work, nothing fancy, just replacing things when they break, usually my old Atari and Amiga that I still have! I'm a software engineer by trade and I've been looking to improve my skills and get into electronics design and start making my own things. The thing that really got me bitten with the bug was after an event that happened on new years eve. I wasn't doing anything this year and just decided to have a quiet night in and watch Netflix, only my Zyxel router decided to blow up one of its chips. I have no idea how it happened, but it did. Most likely it was the cheap power supply that was included with it. I wasn't caring how it happened at this point, it just did. I had to find a solution.

I had a separate VDSL router kicking around, a BT HomeHub5 that was locked to BT Infinity Broadband, but about six months ago I switched ISP. I had no other options but to hack the router and flash it with OpenWRT in order to use it with my new provider. Most of my electronics gear was packed in boxes, and my main soldering iron got broken in the process somehow, so I had to settle for the backup 30W AC iron I had kicking around that had a tip that was way too big for the job. I had no flux and could only find cheap solder that I had from Maplin. As one could imagine, these were not ideal conditions but I was a man without a connection, bored and a bottle of Honey Jack Daniels to work through. I assembled all that I would require, and I got to work.

To obtain the software that I needed for this project, I had to pull out my US Robotics 56k dial up modem that I was planning on using for a retro remote dial in server and put it to use for this endeavour. As one could imagine, this process was slow, tedious and annoying as hell. Appreciate your fast internet connection folks. Life is hell without it.

I followed a marvellous guide on the OpenWRT wiki on how to go about this process for the BT HomeHub5 and where the UART headers were. I made a small network from a useless old ADSL router for my ThinkPad and my original Raspberry Pi that I was going to use to flash the router's firmware with using the GPIO pins on the Pi. Quick, simple, dirty and I had most of the software that I needed on the Pi anyways. There were a few (thankfully) small packages that I never had, but manually downloading them with the 56K modem and then just transferring the Pi took care of that.

I soldered on some wires I ripped off of an old PC case that I didn't need anymore and soldered them on to the board, followed by a liberal application of some electrical tape to keep it all in order. Black and red are the RX and TX, the white wire is a boot selector that when shorted to ground (orange wire), it tells the device to boot up in UART mode, rather than its normal boot process. I hooked the RX and TX up to the Pi, started the HH5 in UART mode and then started sending the u-boot bootloader to the device to flash the new firmware to it.

Once that was done, I got the device to boot over the network from the RPi using tftp. Just a simple network between the router and the Pi, with the Pi setup to have a static IP address of the expected 192.168.1.2 for U-Boot.

192

Success, the image is downloaded and the Linux kernel is booting. All that was left to do after that was install the firmware on the device, after taking backups of the stock ROM and any other pieces of data for the device, such as the calibration data. After that, all I had to do was configure my VDSL modem on the device then just install whatever software I wanted on to the device (admin web interface, openvpn) In all, it was actually a long tedious process that was helped along by a bottle of Honey Jack and my tired assistant. A situation I bet we all know all too well!

Ever since this event, and from many long nights talking with my best friend who is a genius electrical engineer in my eyes, the bug has definitely been caught. So, I'm now in the process of converting one of my spare rooms into a proper hardware lab where I'll be exploring many new projects and sharing them with people on YouTube, letting folks learn as I learn more and sharing the experience. Booze and helpers, and all!

Unlike most others, I wasn't really bitten by the bug until this past year (and I'm in my 40s ).  I do remember going through the Radio Shack catalogs when I was younger thinking how much fun they would be. I took a programming course in college and quickly dropped out of it.  As the years progressed and my confidence in my technical skills increased, I began to dabble more in electronics.  However, it wasn't until I discovered the Raspberry Pi and then discussed it with a co-worker who is an enthusiast that it really began to take off.  My 7 year-old son expressed an interest in learning to code and, eventually, build a robot.  So, I figured why not - let's learn this together.  As we have gotten more involved, I realize the possibilities are endless and make it a point to show my son that it may all seem overwhelming at first, we can figure it out.

We have been having a lot of fun building games and projects and it has been great to see an increase in his confidence as we tackle each new project!

Thanks!!

There is no place in the "edit profile and privacy" page under my profile to ad a phone number as requested above, at least I cant find it. Any ideas? Thanks

Non-nerds think it's a fascination with computers.   Most nerds seem to understand it's a fascination with understanding, where the computer offers a near limitless depth of things to understand and rewards along the way (often called programs) for those who delve ever deeper into the electronic universe, a place that calls out to the logical mind due to it's order, consistency and malleability only limited by one's determination.

But this post is about community, so my origin ethnicity is mixed breed, Timex Sinclair 1000 and Vic20.  The Bug, like so many of the origin stories I read here was when I found I could break the rules of the architecture.  By reading everything an 11 year old could find on how the computer worked, and the daring to open up and solder wires onto the traces of a circuit board, I was able to add a reset switch, and “bank disable” to the cartridge port and “save” cartridges to the cassette tape drive.

It was like stepping outside The Matrix.  The idea that I could bend electronic devices to my will by the simple act of understanding them was intoxicating.  From there, assembly language, C, RF protocols, and a career in telecommunications were all just the next obvious steps.  The bug, the decision and all the bravery were from the shaking soldering iron in the hands of the 11 year old boy who risked the most amazing and expensive thing he'd ever owned to see if all that electronics theory was “real.”

It is.

Both my grandfather on my father's side and on my mother's side were both engineers. On my father's side, the patriarch was a self taught engineer in Detroit. My father, while not a professional engineer, also tinkered with all sorts of projects from engines and motorcycles to fixing old fishing reels. You might say that I was born with a love of engineering. My father also kept company with many engineers and inventors. One such man I can remember "invented the machines that make the machines that make everyday stuff," as it was told to me. My father took me once to his workshop and showed me some of his inventions, one was a nut cracker that could automatically apply as much pressure as was needed to crack any nut. Another, a device used to pickup and collect pecans, it was a simple coil on the end of a stick, so simple but revolutionary. These simple mechanisms were the inspiration for my own desire to tinker, disassemble, and reassemble pretty much everything I've ever owned. unlike the men who came before me I have been born into a digital world, and with that the opportunity to use a vast array of tools provided to me by the technology world. Thanks to community support and cost effective tech, diy projects and computing is easy as pi.