Knowledge is Power

I’ll start this blog by stating my background and what drove me to electronics.

First, I’m a French Canadian… some sentences might sound weird, but hopefully you’ll get the idea behind it!

As a kid, I always liked robots… the Transformers, Short Circuit, Robocop and Terminator made a huge impression on me. I wanted to build robots when I’d grow up. Eventually, I started playing more PC games and learned how to “modify” them and my save games. I think that’s when I decided I’d be a programmer instead. Although I’ve had the opportunity to work on great games, robots were still something I found fascinating… so I specialized in game AI. This way, I’d have the best of both worlds… working on “autonomous entities” while not being constrained by physical space and battery life.

My whole life I tried to educate myself in diversified domains, but I’ve always stayed away from electronics because it seemed complicated, involved parts that I would have to order, that could break, etc… anyway, I decided to get past all these barriers before turning 30, so this is it, I’m learning electronics!

I’m creating this blog in hopes that it might help other programmers who are “afraid” of moving towards the hardware world. I’ll be posting all my “discoveries” and mistakes so most probably, other beginners will be able to learn from this blog. By all means, double check the information you’ll be getting from here, I’m still learning so there might be things I got wrong!

To get started, I first wrote to the guys of Hack a Day for tips.  Steve was kind enough to answer with a ton of information.  Unfortunately most of it was way over my capabilities, but he suggested that I read the Engineers Mini Notebooks written by Forest Mims.  After reading about Forest Mims, I learned that he was the guy responsible of writing sample circuits for Radio Shack so that they could sell more components (interesting projects -> more sales).  He also wrote a ton of books so I got a few of them.  The “Engineers Mini Notebooks” are not really useful for a beginner… they’re more like reference books.  I’d compare them to Bjarne Stroustroup’s “The C++ Programming Language”, while everyone should have it lying somewhere near the computer, it’s not good learning material.  When purchasing Mims’ notebooks from the W5YI Group, I found the book “Getting Started in Electronics”… this seemed like what I needed!  And boy, I was right!  The book is really great, even if at times I was under the impression I was reading a kids book.  Everything is really well explained and sometimes I felt like I was reading my own notes from a EE class.  I definitely recommend it!

Like programming, reading books won’t make you good… practice makes perfect!  So I decided to go simple and modular… I would start with a low complexity project while keeping the door open for additions.  I decided to start with a gym timer.  Since I own a gym and all we have are basic timers, I wanted to have a customizable timer that could handle interval trainings.  To keep the learning curve quite low, I decided to start with an Arduino… most of the logic would be written in C and only when I’d get to more complex features would I require deeper electronics understanding.

More to come on my current setup, the basic tools I got, my projects, etc…

Stay tuned!