It's the start of another month, in another year, at home and looking for things to do, and one of the hobbies I have been long wanting to start, has started.
In 1978 the powers that be required the young Ford apprentices to make a critical decision after the two year training point, two years in those of us that passed the ONC in mechanical and electrical engineering, at the heady age of 18, needed to make a decision as they moved on for the HNC and the next two years of our lives.
Mechanical or Electrical.
I chose mechanical engineering for my life at a time when I was hardly able to choose what trousers to wear.
Enough history though, I've long wished to refresh my knowledge of electrical things and have bought a few text books along the way, but have realised with time, simply owning text books do not make you smarter. In the last few years I have been watching "Big Clive" on youtube and his various projects have stirred me to purchase a breadboard kit and an arduino or two.
At the left a simple breadboard, run via a nine volt battery and a five volt converter, it has taught me once again about Ohms law, V=IR, and I have obtained a rudimentary understanding of how to light an LED, and the understanding that an LED is not a bulb, it is in fact, a light emitting diode...
At the right, an Arduino UNO board, which is an amazing little programmable microcontroller, and after running the BLINK program that blinks an onboard LED, I have today modified that program to transmit SOS and then, as shown above, modified the program further, to transmit SOS on an external blue LED on a small breadboard.
I am actually very excited about these baby steps towards understanding electronics a little more, it has been a long time since choosing the wrong trousers, and of course, pretending to be a mechanical engineer during my career did not do me any harm whatsoever, but it will be a nice pastime to make LEDs blink, stepper motors step and sensors sense.
And I don't know where it will end up, but I believe it will be fun trying.
