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Engineering: the art of making what you want from things you can get.

Hardware

March 23, 2009

My interest for electronics started when I was 9 years old. My father had a case full of old russian components (back then, Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Union, so the only available components were russian ones). I remember playing with a badly filtered power supply (one was able to hear the 50 Hz sound when connected to a loudspeaker), some resistors (the best were the ones that got hot fast when connected to a power source - I tried to boil a cup of water with them) and a galvanometer, which my father bought for a lab power supply he had been building - needless to say that I connected it to a voltage which was too high for it, and it went up in smoke.

When I came to Austria, I started building a lot of electronics kits (the ones available at Conrad). I never really understood the circuits used, but I got quite good at soldering.

I've always wanted to build a robot. Actually, I wanted to build quite a few - I had endless ideas. After I grew up a bit, I realized that actually building an idea of me wasn't so easy. A lot of internet search led me to microcontrollers. They seemed perfect for a robot, and it was good that I was playing around a lot with programming at the time, too.

After reading a lot of microcontroller and robot pages, I also considered learning how to etch PCBs, which I did. At home, I'm stuck with making single-sided PCBs, but that is enough for me. Some microcontroller projects also needed additional electronics, so I was learning by doing, and I got to know how to use many components.

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