I’ve worked with electronics for as far back as I can remember. I took apart little televisions, large televisions, VCRs, radios, and a number of things whose owners had expressed a strong preference that I did not.
Getting them back together was not always part of the early process.
The early days
I was soldering before I turned ten, and learning repeatedly what it meant to let the smoke out.
Pulling apart VCRs and televisions led to experiments with the signals running between them. I worked out how to feed audio through recording equipment, and eventually turned a VCR into a very long-duration cassette recorder. What stayed with me was that equipment will often do something other than the job printed on the front panel.
Kits helped, including one of the 101-projects sets common in the 1980s, but most of the learning came from trial, error, and wanting to know why the last attempt had stopped working.
A favourite build
One of my favourite projects was a small hardware random-number generator built around a tiny PIC microcontroller.
The first board was etched by hand in the kitchen; later versions came from a PCB house. I designed translucent 3D-printed snowflakes around the boards and made more than twenty personalized decorations for family members.
Each snowflake carried three LEDs powered by a CR2032 battery, flickering in a slow firefly pattern for months. The hardware was small enough that I hand-soldered the SOIC and 0805 parts, and the software had to be shaped around individual assembly instructions to fit a 512-word program ROM.
It pulled in nearly every part of the hobby at once: circuit design, PCB work, constrained programming, hand assembly, 3D printing, and making something specific for another person.
Other projects
The electronics work has included:
- Software-defined radios and radio interfaces
- AX.25 packet-radio modems
- Automatic power-control circuits
- Microcontroller projects using PIC, Arduino, ESP32, and ESP8266 devices
- Raspberry Pi and embedded systems
- FPGA experiments, including RISC-V processors built from the logic upward
- Synthesizers, music visualizers, and interfaces between audio hardware
- Wireless links between radio and control devices
The browser-based FPGA Logic Simulator takes some of the digital-logic work somewhere circuits, Verilog, state, and target resources can be explored together.
The workshop
The current workspace is a large mess of components, instruments, cables, and half-built ideas waiting to be wired into something else.
No single large hardware build dominates the bench right now. The work tends to be a one-off circuit, a radio interface, an FPGA design, or a physical subsystem for another project.
I am also returning to robotics and other systems that have to interact with the real world. Software is forgiving about where it runs. A robot, antenna switch, or synthesizer eventually has to meet voltage, timing, noise, connectors, and gravity.
Learning
Most of my electronics education was trial and error, with kits and reference books when a problem demanded actual theory. Audio work and amateur radio pushed me into more structured reading. The Art of Electronics is still the book I reach for, though I use it as a reference rather than reading it end to end.
The habit that has served me best is keeping a build small enough that I can still trace why it failed.