When I was a kid, i was digging through a spare room in our house and I found an electronics training kit that had been my step fathers from a long time previous, it had to be from the 50's or 60's. It was a bunch of individual components mounted on blocks of wood with captive terminals on each end. They were huge. There was a power supply module that had a tube, resistors, inductors, capacitors, everything. Each individually mounted.

Along with the components were manuals that contained connection diagrams and schematics. I was a curious kid (about 12 at the time) and I leafed through the volumes and found the instructions for a low power FM transmitter. I'm not sure how I figured it out, but I built it, and tested it before my parents got home from work. When they got home I tuned the radio to the appropriate frequency, and called out a message when they were in earshot of the radio. I said, "Watson, come here, I want you", which were the words  I had heard Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant over the telephone for the first time. I don't even know how I figured it out, but I had used a speaker as a microphone, as I didn't have one. My parents came into the garage and saw what I had built. My stepfather remarked that the kit was from a correspondence course he had taken, and he had never been able to make anything useful out of the kit, and he was amazed at what I had accomplished.

I was very pleased with the result and I went on to build many of the projects in the kit. After that I would wander into Radio Shack and browse the kits and components and build whatever I could afford to build. I was fortunate to have been a teenager when the first home computers became available and that further cemented my interest in electronics and computers.

Mike

It all started 2015 during a camping holiday in Italy. Because I did not want to risk that my expensive laptop gets damaged or stolen, I bought a cheap tablet to cover my needs for email communication and access to the Internet.

For many years, I have been an enthusiastic user of virtual worlds such as Secondlife or Opensimulator and the 3D graphics software Blender. These systems require a lot of computing power.

On vacation I was amazed from the computing power of my cheap tablet and came up with the idea of using this after the holiday as a simulator. Quickly I noticed that this is not suitable and I was looking for a solution that let me build a small blackbox, optimized for the purpose, which requires as little power as possible and can be operated without fan.

I started the search for suitable devices for my project and bought a Minix Neo, which I disassembled at first and started with some programming. The box was too 'closed' to achive my goals but I soon found the ODROID XU-4. A great box from a performance point of view, but it required a fan and was too expensive to reach my project goals. So I've given the Raspberry Pi 2 a try. It turned out that I was too optimistic with regard to my project idea.

The dream was out, but my interest in miniaturization and the technologies available today remain. I have learned that much can be realized for little money and it was really fun to experiment with my Raspberry Pi almost day by day. I loved it and this never stopped!

As my son, he is an artist, asked me how to synchronize several Kodak Carousel projectors from the 1990s for a show, I didn't know an answer but wondered how to do that with a Raspberry Pi. And soon later I entered another new world, the world of micro controllers and I bought an Arduino.

I had 6 weeks available to create a multi projector controlling device for my son's art project at an exihibtion in Switzerland. I never  worked on real projects with electronics. I studied the possibilities to control the projector and made a plan. I was faced with the challenge of coupling 30 years old technology with today's technologies, things like pairing 24 volts with 5 volts. Due to the kind of the project the challenge was not only in technology, but also in its visual design.

I found the whole thing so exciting that I wanted to do it all myself. Yes, even a stripped-down Arduino. I found a kit with all parts needed, spent a weekend to disassemble and resoldering old electronics, just to learn soldering as quickly as possible, and finally had built my first working Helvetino. Then I ordered the relays, potis, DIN plugs and sockets for my project, as well as diodes, capacitors, resistors and other small parts that I still needed.

Just one week before the vernissage I had finished everything, but the projectors used were in Berlin and I had no projector to test the real thing. Since I could never be sure if my plan was going to go up, I bought relays shield for my Arduino. Plan B would be to replace my controller part by a Arduino Uno and a ready for use relays shield. The rest could be maintained.

Only 36 hours before the vernissage I had the first opportunity to test the control on the real object. At first, everything went well until we discovered a small mistake in the regulation, which I could not explain. Then I noticed that the Atmega-328-P got very hot. Since the only thing I changed was the external power supply I could imagine a problem with it. And unfortunately it was the case! The cheap power supply was bad and its voltage far too high. This has destroyed my regulation, so that the microcontoller got a unregulated voltage of up to 11 V instead of the usual 5 V.

Now, Plan B was the only option left. It was a hard decission to take. I needed around four hours for the conversion. I had thought of everything, but not that in case of the solution with the Arduino the relays shield will not fit into the housing because the potis are in its way. However, finally with some skill and a few tricks I managed to get it in and just 24 hours before the vernissage the first real test worked flawlessly.

Finally the project was a great success for both, me and my son. Everything worked fine and without any problems during the exhibition over 4 weeks. It was an exciting project with a lot of fun in any aspect!

If you asked me to do that 18 months ago I would have answered: "Are you crazy"? Today I would say: "Sure we can, let's try"!

As a child I wanted to know how things worked, how they were designed how they were built. At the age of 6 my father gave me a set of tools and with my trusty screwdriver and pliers I would dismantle anything I could get my hands on... old radios, TVs etc. I would carefully remove the components but then I would take it a step further and de-construct the components themselves, Capacitors full of endless rolls of paper and foil, valves (vacuum tubes) had wondrous shaped pieces of metal.  As I grew older I was given some great construction kits for Christmas, and one year it was a  Philips Electronics Engineer.  With that I started building my own designs.   It was only natural therefore,  that I would persue a career in Electronics.

I am now retired but I still have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of anything scientific and technical.

I had that one too! I started off with an Apple IIe, ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum +3 and a few other exotic things, before finally settling down on the Amiga for a few years (and learning assembly). I only went to PCs because I didn't have a choice. The BBC Micro was at school, but while other preferred to break their legs on skateboards or show off awesome soccer skills, I tried to sneak into the maths lab and learn everything I could about the BBC Micro.

How was I bit by the Engineering & Technology Bug?  Well, it started when I was a kid.  My oldest brother was sort of a Science Geek and he was always creating experiments that either blew something up or created some crazy affect.  I started to experiment on my own by taking apart any electronic device I had just to see what was inside. Some kids had a bug or leaf collection; I had a collection of Transistor Radios, Slot Cars and Trains that had been tore apart and poorly reassembled. When I was in High School I found there was a 3 hour ROP class in Electronics so I had to get involved in that and had a ton of fun creating an alarm system for my '74 Plymouth Valiant and learning how to build simple circuits. After High School I entered the Marine Corps and studied anything I could that was Electronics related such the CIE courses and any extension course the Marine Corps offered.  While I was in the Gulf War (Desert Storm era), my father in-law sent me a Sharp PC-E500 Pocket Computer that could be programmed in BASIC, so any spare time I could find I was programming that PC-E500. I knew this was the future for me, so when I got out of the Service, I attended a Local Community College to Study Electronics Technology and had a great teacher, Mr. Evangelisti, who provided both great instruction as well encouragement to push beyond the norm of the courses. Back then we were burning our programs written in 2 digit Hex into an EPROM to control Stepper Motors and such, but I did study Visual Basic at another Community College. This was the start of a series of educational routes that took me from an Associate in Electronics with honors, to a Bachelors in Computer Science to a Masters in Software Engineering.  I still find education very important to stay relevant in the Tech Field, so any chance I get I'll take an online course on some new technology or grab a dev board such as the latest TI CC1350 to keep my synapses firing. I'm certainly hooked and will keep banging away at it until my synapses stop firing.    

It began when I saw my father open up our radio when it stopped working,  I was about 5 and i saw was some green things with alot of little shinny stuff on it and some other things I could not touch.  Years passed then it happened.  I watched my father build a computer from scratch.  The impact of that made me decide that anything that anything that I would do I would work with the electronics and computers.  At the end of high school it was career decision time.  My father had it all figured out, but his surprise I didn't want to do computing.  I declared I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer.  Luckily, I was selected into an apprenticeship program to become a licenced aircraft maintenance engineer.  Then they asked question.  What do you want to do?  Mechanical or Electrical.  When making that decision I remembered my father working on the electronics in the house so my decision was only natural.  I chose electrical and as they say the rest is history.

I no longer own the manual, but I went to Bletchley Park a few years ago and they had a room full of BBC Micros with programming manuals alongside!

Oh yeah! Another Amiga fan here!

I used the BBC Micro at school, but it was the Speccy all the way for me, when I got home

jlangbridge, is this what you're thinking of? I seem to recall it came in the box with the computer.

Inderpreet Singh wrote:

 

...Looking at a fan, I kept wondering what was inside that made it spin at high velocity and how can I make it myself. I got my hands on a screwdriver early on and went on a rampage...

 

Is that how the fan ended up your head last year?

Ah, the BBC Micro! One of my eye openers too (along with the Amiga series). I wish I had the BBC Basic programming manual, we only had them at school, but the memory will be there forever. Not too sure if they can be found on ebay... I'll have to look one of these days, but I'll probably end up spending far too much.