When I was a kid, I loved LEGO, every birthday, every Christmas, any occasion I wanted LEGO. All I pretty much did was playing with LEGOs. Both of my parents were teachers in Latvia and the pay back in the 90s was not so great, but my dad understood the importance of LEGO in my early years and kept on buying it. At one point the amount of LEGO was the most valuable thing we had, even more valuable then the Lada 2101 my dad was driving. I was building anything I could think about, and LEGO taught me a lot - math while counting bricks, construction and structural engineering while building cranes, It taught me love for bikes when I understood how gears worked.

Later I loved LEGO Technics - It was great for building all this stuff, but for a young curious mind that was not enough, I wanted those expensive LEGO electronics kits that my parents could not afford. I asked them If I could get any, but the answer was "no". Hoping, waiting and repetitive asking did not help. It just cost too much.

At some point I started adding various non LEGO components to my projects - rubber bands, springs from pens, glass marbles, steel weight for catapults etc. It made my LEGO experiance more fun but something was still mising. One day I went to my dads office at the school he was working and I was studying in the First or Second class. There I saw this old Soviet copy machine in ugly brown plastic, but it was opened, it didn't work and was meant for scrap, but I it was the first time I had the idea to salvage parts - I asked dad if I can I remove those Motors I saw? I knew how DC motors looked from my friends cheap RC cars that always broke and that I never had (I had LEGO), but these were bigger. They were 9V and that was a lot of battery money for me. Tape came along and it all worked and worked well - it was the first time gears started to break due to torque. A week later dad made a 9V power supply so I wouldn't have to spend my pocket money on batteries. A month later I had build a wired "remote control" LEGO car which would steer and drive forward and backward working on a 7.2V Nokia THF-2 Rechargable battery (My granny's old mobile at the time). It was a marvel and didn't cost my parents a fortune. It was the first thing I ever built that I could be really proud about.

From there things just continued and 18 years later I am a mechanical engineer with love for salvaging parts, DIY and electronics. I did receive a lot of LEGO, but I think the most valuable gift I received at the time was the understanding of "Outside the Box" thinking and getting things I couldn't get while using my head.

Now I make my money from freelance mechanical engineering constructing conveyor systems, I listen and play punk rock, build my guitar pedals from scratch, weld my bikes and sew my own clothing. I don't really like to work, I like to play. I don't play with LEGO anymore, I play with bigger toys.

Krisjanis

not certain what all information too give. i used too play tball as a kid till my mom first gave me an electronics kit it was one of those 30 or so in 1 electronics kit's the first thing i rember me and dad building was a burglar  alarm. as i rember it one of the wires were not on the right spring so i pulled the entire thing appart and put it back togeather. ever sence then i have been learning and progressing much more then wen i had first started its easly been 30 pluss years sence i first started playing with electronics. ive had my favorite pepole i learn from such as ben heck and jhons arcade on youtube that i learn and find new ideas and projects i can do and learn from. if there is any further informatio needed send a message.

My love for any machine or technology came from wanting to make toys. Back in the 60's we only had a black and white TV in the village and kids were only authorized to watch TV on Saturdays and Sunday Afternoon.  I wanted all the gadgets from "Mission Impossible"  and "Get Smart". I kept making all kinds of things. I am not na Engineer but I try to improve my skills as much as I can and pass it on to my Kids

The story of how I became hooked on technology is a long one, covering nearly 40 years.  But, I’ll do my best to condense it into something readable.  Sorry, If I am a bit long-winded!  This is much like creating a resume; how can you condense 30+ years of work into 2 pages?  Anyway, here goes ...

I began my interest in technology at a very early age.  My Dad got me interested in electronics when I was about 10 years old.  He wasn’t a very good teacher, but I was intrigued by the things he was doing and I liked doing them with him.  LED’s and a 555 timer could keep me dazzled for hours.  And Forrest Mims was quite readable and understandable, even for me.

Wanting to take electronics further, but not having the funds to do so, I discovered that the garbage bins out back of the IBM building were full of discarded circuit boards that were loaded with digital ICs sitting in IC sockets.  An enterprising kid such as myself could save a lot of money by popping those chips off the boards carefully.  I made most of my early circuits this way.  Later on I discovered an electronics store that sold kits and parts at reasonable prices, and my allowance was suddenly less of a hindrance to my interests.  I bought an Apple IIe kit and cut my teeth learning how to solder all the parts on.  It was very cool when it was finished and worked!  Now I needed to learn how to program.  That led to a Commodore Vic 20, and later a Commodore 64.  I still enjoyed dumpster-diving, though.  At least I did until IBM caught on and started locking their bins.  Hmmph.

When I was in the tenth grade at High School, they introduced their very first computer course.  We used PET computers that had, I believe, about 2k of RAM and a cassette tape storage device similar to one I had used with my Vic 20.  Then came the 5.25” single-sided floppy disks that would store 170kb.  After that, in a big step forward, came a 10MB (yup, Megabyte) hard disk that we shared by using a manual data switch to connect it to our PC when we needed to save or load a program.  At that time, I actually knew more about digital electronics and logic than my teacher did, even after the school sent him on courses to learn about it (it was just so new).  There were some other guys in the class that were really into computers as well and they knew how to program.  Together we used assembly language to create a monochromatic version of Pac-Man that used ASCII graphics and the arrow keys to great effect.  We had a lot of fun with that.  Unfortunately, that was the only such course available in the school and there was nothing for us in the latter grades.  Not being very strong in math, I was unable to prepare myself adequately for a degree in computer science and failed miserably at it in University, so I switched to Sociology instead.  There were no other tech courses in existence that I knew of, and I still wasn’t thinking about college.  Sadly, during my time in my High School, the thinking of the day was; if you are academically adept you go to University; if you aren’t that adept you go to college; and if you are just short of an idiot you go into the trades (boy, did they get that wrong!).  Thus, I never even considered anything else but university and Sociology was about all I could handle at that level.

During my time in university I had to use computers, even if I wasn’t learning about them specifically.  That led me to learn of the Bit-Net, the predecessor to the Internet that was used by academic institutions.  After learning that I could send a text message to a student (and occasionally ALL of them by accident) in another university, such as the University of Heidleberg, Germany or the University of Tokyo in Japan, I became fascinated by the fact that two computers could actually TALK to each other over vast distances.  I was fascinated.  I tried to learn everything I could about this and bought my first modem which allowed me to communicate with the university from my home at a whopping 300 baud – a huge leap from the previous standard of 75!  30 years later, my home network currently enjoys 35MB down, and 3.5MB up.  Not directly comparable, I know.  But you get the point.

Before I finished my degree, I was introduced to the IT Director at one of the largest law firms in the country by a friend of mine who had made it into Computer Science.  This fellow said he thought I would make an excellent IT Analyst, and he offered me my first tech job.  I took it.  I fixed printers, which were networked.  This allowed me to learn a great deal more about networking and data communications.  After I lost that job, I wasn’t able to work directly with networks again until I went to college at the age of 30, but I was still fascinated so I studied Computer Programming and Networking.  After graduation, the college helped me land a job with a large telecommunications company that provided a data network connection to the home via coaxial cable.  I answered phones in the call centre and solved technical issues.  At home, I scrounged together a 19” half-rack and every used PC I could lay my hands on.  I ran linux on all of them, networked them and ran everything I could get my hands on; Border Gateway Protocol servers, Proxy servers, Squid servers (intrusion detection), Apache web servers.  You name it, and I tried it and learned as much as I could as quickly and as deeply as I could.  It paid off.  In two years, I rose through the ranks to become a project manager of a team of 21 techs and got involved in some very cool projects like implementing an Interactive Voice Response system that was the first to answer incoming customer calls.  Not long after, I bumped my head on the ceiling.  Realising that I could go no further with that company, I took a job with a large utility company as an IT Analyst and helped them replace their entire data network with newer equipment.  I had to work closely with the engineers from the telecom company providing the new equipment and, after doing so for a number of months, one of them was promoted to management.  He offered me an opportunity that I could not refuse and I joined them only five months after starting with the utility company.  Just a side note; my manager at the time (utility company) had no idea how to process the paperwork for me to exit the company as no one had ever quit the company in his 25 years there.  It was a union environment, and no one really had to work for a living if they didn’t want to.  Who would quit that?  Me.

Now working for the new telecom company, I found that despite having over 100,000 employees worldwide, the engineering team that I was a part of operated much like its own little business.  There were only nine of us and we were constantly on the move, and I was constantly learning.  I LOVED that job and that team!  Unfortunately, little did we know that the higher-ups had been engaged in some questionable activities for some time at that point, and the company went into a tail-spin.  I was let go with tens of thousands of others as part of an emergency down-sizing in an effort to save the company, but to no avail.  The company itself ceased to exist not long after that.  Once again, it was time to go back to school.

Having realised that I was well suited to engineering and technology, a fact that my High School counsellors were incapable of noticing, I decided to stick with it and went to college.  From that point onward my life has been a cycle of employment, unemployment, school, and back to employment (including self-employment) as the tech industry has changed, the economy has changed, and I have changed.  For a guy who was told that my generation would not see the cradle-to-grave work life that my father did, but rather would have two to three different careers, I am now on my eleventh different technical career!  I have also gone to college to study technical subjects such Computer Programming & Networking, Robotics & Automation, Biomedical Engineering Technology, Electronics Technology, and Energy Systems Engineering Technology.  I also went through a four-year apprenticeship as a Millwright which I enjoyed immensely; though due to a military injury (did I mention that I was in the military?) I am no longer able to work as a Millwright.  I am currently considering another trip to college for Electrical Engineering Technology (quite different from Electronics Technology) as I work with a company that does electrical sub-station design and maintenance and I’d like to learn, in detail, some of the more esoteric elements of this field.  I am also a Certified Thermographer and very much enjoy the science of this discipline in general, but especially as it is applied to the electrical field.  I am even looking at learning about ultrasonic technology, as applied to the electrical field, because it is really cool.  Oh yeah, and it could be useful, too!

Long story short (yeah, I know it’s a little late for that); I started out loving the fact that technology was something that I could share with my father, and ended up loving the fact that technology is something I can indulge in anytime I want and in just about any way that I want, and I love this!  Case in point; I have always been blown away by what can be made with a CNC machine.  Thanks to YouTube, and the Internet in general, I was able to build one in my basement!  I can design my own stuff, and make it in my own house, using software and hardware that would have been ABSOLUTELY out of reach for any but the largest and richest of companies when I was a boy.  Today, we have open-source software, open-source hardware, community versions of top-of-the-line software, inexpensive hardware, 3D printers, laser cutters, hobby (and not-so-hobby) scale CNC machines, etc., etc., all available to the creative and techy minds out there for such reasonable costs that they are driving real change in our society.  Suppliers of such technology and the parts and meterials required for their use, such as element14 (nice plug, eh?), also provide community forums (such as this one) where these folks can exchange ideas and information.  This is where the real power for change lies.  And all you need is an internet connection and the desire to use it.

The ever increasing facilitation of creativity for those working in their kitchens, basements, garages, and college labs is INCREDIBLE and I can’t wait to see what comes of it.  Just you go to a MAKER FAIRE to see exactly what I’m talking about.  If you think the world is full of problems, go to one of these events and you will see the very people who are going to solve them.  And that includes you and me, thanks to the pervasiveness and availability of technology, AND the information and education regarding its use that is so freely available.  With all of this in mind, how can you NOT love technology??

If you are still reading this, you deserve a beer.  Cheers!

Jeff

A good idea - yes, I know Jonathan and Chris, as well as many of the other Sinclair community.

I have created a blog post - 30 Years Supporting the Sinclair ZX81

Ah, the Spectrum! There's a lot of love for Clive's baby here, Rich -- you'll feel right at home   (I suspect we might know a few of the same people, if your UK-based and into the Speccy -- Chris Wilkins? Jonathon Cauldwell?)

I'd be interested in reading more about your work with the ZX81, and the SD card adaptors. Maybe a blog post about them would be interesting to everyone?

Always having had a keen interest in mathematics, I started out learning to program programmable calculators, and then with the birth of the home computer industry, bought a Sinclair ZX81 from my brother (he had moved onto a Spectrum) and taught myself to program both ZX BASIC and Z80 Machine Code.

I moved onto the SInclair QL when it was launched in 1984, and taught myself 68008 machine code - so much easier and started analysing other people's code as part of bug-testing and reviewing software for magazines in the 80s.

Since then, my hobby turned into a business, with me learning more through various PLC programming projects (including bug-fixing someone elses code for a sewerage handling plant), and turning my hand to C so that I could adapt an existing printer driver to handle 720dpi and colours as these technologies became more widespread.

Since then, I have continued to support the retro and vintage computer market, by reverse engineering parts and tracking down old stocks of computer chips and connectors, as well as getting involved in numerous interface projects.  I am proud to say that I was behind the re-vitalisation of the Sinclair ZX81 market which had long been forgotten until I decided to turn back to this - and the market is now flourishing thanks to SD card interfaces (which cannot be made quickly enough), and lots of new software making the most of modern development tools and pushing the limits of this (originally) 1K computer to the max.

The Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi have both opened new opportunities for me to provide products which are aimed at keeping both this retro computer market; as well as numerous industrial applications to the fore, all built around my love of electronics and programming, and the desire to get the best out of any hardware.

I grew up in the jungle at the equator with no TV, no computers, no electronics stores and no cell phones, but I always liked building things like kites, sailboats, slingshots and model planes. We also had Meccano and Tinkertoy to get creative with.

My first big decision came when I was 11 - my parents let me decide if I wanted to go to boarding school in Canada or stay and train to be a professional athlete. Although I love sports, I chose to get an education.

I was not a good student though - I was always reading books when I was supposed to be doing homework, and I mean always.

My next big decision was to jump from grade 11 (5th form) to engineering at university (because it was cheaper than boarding school). I wanted to be a mechanical engineer because I had never been exposed to electronics and I had been designing a rotary internal combustion engine in my head.

However this jump put me way behind my classmates that were coming out of grade 13. I had never seen a computer and never even heard of calculus. I remember my first computer science assignment was to write a program that used numerical methods to calculate an integral. That was a huge challenge, but I managed to figure it out and get 100% on the assignment. It was such a thrilling accomplishment to successfully learn all that in a few days and get that first program to execute properly that I have always liked computers ever since.

My next big decision was to become a systems engineer (mostly electronics) because I realized it would be way cheaper to tinker with electronics as a hobby than outfit a machine shop. I still took lots of mechanical courses though which have been very useful.

The rest is just a long storied history of fun projects, learning new things and inventing stuff..... And I still get to do sports.

I was a young teenage self taught programmer (XB, ASM on a TI-99/4a) when my uncle (an electrician) got a divorce and then moved in with us for a while. He was fascinated with my computer and programming and made a deal where he would teach me some electronics if I would teach him some programming. I was fascinated how close the two were related. Electronics was basically programming but physically instead of software. AND, OR, XOR, it was all there but in chips. Well my first real thing I did is what got me hooked. Back before remote controls existed for televisions our furnace intake was just above our couch and the TV across the room like normal. Well my dad would complain all the time because when the furnace kicked on the intake was so loud he had to get up and turn the volume up. When it kicked off, it was back up, across the room and turn it back down. He hated that!

Well we had a couple of those monitors that use the 110 wiring to transmit and receive voice. I knew if I could find a 5v change on the board when TALK was pressed I could use a relay and another Volume knob to turn the TV up, I also needed 110 from the furnace. Well I found the 5v on the monitor when the button was pressed to talk. Well those things could be locked on as well. So I locked it on, went to the furnace closet and got lucky, there was a 110 outlet right on the wall that went hot with the furnace. I just plugged it in and that side was done. When the furnace came on, it turned on the transmitter and sent the signal.

I opened the back of the console TV and ran the original volume knob through my relay for off, and drilled a hole in the press board back and installed another knob through my relay for (Furnace on!). Now set the back knob louder and the front knob softer. Now when the furnace kicked on, the TV went up! (and it was adjustable too) When the furnace turned off the TV went back down! (to the front knob setting) My dad, well my entire family was just blown away! My brother still brags to this day, and I am now 51 years old, so it's been quite some time ago. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed myself, and seeing that I could do things like that I just fell in love!!! I have been in love every since. Oh, and of course I fix everything in the world for my family and all their friends as well, as we all probably do.

For those days and times, that was pretty amazing!

I cant wait to read some other stories as well.

I got interested in electronics only about 4 years ago when I started studying physics at university. I got a little task to program stm microcontroller and even though it was mostly programming task I got really curious. Programming always fascinated me, but only when I noticed that digital world can be transfered to real life - control, move and detect things, I got really amazed.

Soon I got familiar with microcontroller basics - PWM, GPIOs, ADC's, some PID control theory. Then I saw quadcopters on youtube (which also were pretty impressive to me) and a wild thought appeared - I have enough knowledge to build a quadcopter flight controller by myself! (big mistake ). In theory everything seemed so easy. So I started building it from scratch. Homemade frame, cheapest motors, cheapest propellers, no oscilloscope - it was meant to fail and of course it did But doing that, I received solid (imo) understanding about project planning, digital filtering techniques, soldering basics and etc.. I also equiped myself with basic tools required for electronics - logic analyzer, multimeter, soldering iron, breadboards, leds, resistors, capacitors and etc...

Now I am still learning different technologies on my spare time - programming beaglebone black (which I received from element14 last christmas!), adapting Rpi media center and RetroPie station to suit my needs, making (slowly) granular synthesizer with STM32F3Discovery board, experimenting with ESP8266 boards and etc...

I think element14 fueled my interest in electronics a lot and I am thankful for that!