Did engineers/hobbyists on this forum do electronics as a kid? Please share!
Microcontrolled
Posts: 2,461
I have heard numerous recollections of childhood nerdom, but was wondering just how many people here started out young. It would be encouaging to me to hear what it was like when you did your early experimentation. Don't be shy, I know that there are a lot of you. Thanks!
Micro
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Micro
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Comments
After my initial 'Shock' (pun intended) I was curious to discover how that small battery was able to paste my tounge to the back of my head, and make every part of my body hurt so throughly.
And it was all down hill from there..... Grabbing· old·TV's from the junk pile behind 'Voice and Vision', the local Radio and TV Store.
By the time I was 12 I already knew what 120, 240 AC , 3000 and 25kv DC felt like. You would never think that thoes glass picture tubes could zap you 2 days after turning it off!!!!
I also learned early that you do not pull the plug wire from a running lawn mower engine! (More than once)
In high school it was Basic Programming, building tube radios and cars. Ok but there is some electricity in a car!!!
And now at 55 I an a non-curable 'Electron junkie'
The END...
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Alan Bradford ·N1YMQ
Plasma Technologies
Canaan NH 03741
www.plasmatechnologies.com
Not much after I understood "hot", I was turned loose with a soldering iron on old stuff to take the components out. My uncle and dad were both Ham radio operators, and always working on something.
About 10 or so, I got to do my first "Heathkit". It was a decade resistor box, followed by the capacitor version. Then an intercom system for my grandparents. I loved the Heathkit stuff.
About 12 or 13 I "graduated" from slot cars to model trains, and did my own "transformer" (Pulse control, which was the "new" thing), as well as a diode relay system that could run two trains automatically. The relay board made more noise than the trains.
Since them, I've been dabbling to some extent in one thing or another, both at work and home. It was mostly small scale IC projects, controls, signals and detection for model railroads, light dimmers, charging systems, industrial and test lab controls, etc.
At the young age of about 46, I got my first STAMP. I got the bug, and quickly migrated to the SX (price was a driving factor, and for me it wasn't any more difficult) and then my Crustcrawler NOMAD (18 servo hexapod). About that time, the prop came out. the Nomad is Prop Powered, but has been idle for quite some time (due to lack of time and other priorities), I am working on retrofitting a pick and place "micro lab" machine into a prop powered 3 axis milling machine (about 36 x 12 x 10 work envelope), and some aquarium room automation (testing, water purification, etc.).
By training and trade, I am a former mechanical engineer, migrated to software development, and am currently an IT Manager, and still involved in business software development.
Geek, Nerd, Loner, Thinker, Tinkerer, Eccentric, etc., have all been used to describe me. (that's just the polite listing)
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John R.
Click here to see my Nomad Build Log
oldcomputermuseum.com/brainiac_k30.html
From there it was onto one of those "101 experiments" electronic construction sets. I remember skipping all the preliminary stuff to build the one-tube regenerative shortwave radio. That was exciting! I could pick up BBC, Radio Moscow, and a station in Quito, Ecuador!
My uncle was a ham radio operator and, seeing my interest, thought that I should become one, too. So I started saving my pennies from a TV Guide route that I had at the time (making four cents a copy) to buy a Heathkit HR-10 ham receiver. It took the better part of a year of saving before my parents were sure I was serious and lent me the balance that I needed to buy the kit, which was $79. I was probably 13 at the time. After assembling the kit, with my uncle's help, and getting it working, I began taking a Morse code class from him, along with some other ham wannabes.
When I got my Novice license, my uncle lent me a transmitter and helped me set up a real outdoor antenna, and it was off to the races. Eventually, I got a General Class license, just squeaking by the 13 w.p.m. code test at the FCC office in Indianapolis. At this point, I realized I didn't much care for actually talking to anyone on-air. I was just in it for the tech thrill. This eventually led to the acquisition of a Western Union teletype machine, along with a modem, of sorts, that I built from old TV parts. That got me on-air digitally, for the first time.
Eventually, due to other interests, I let my license lapse and sold my equipment to the son of a math teacher I had in high school. Meanwhile, I pursued and obtained college degrees in physics (which had the coolest labs) and computer science. But the germ of my interest in those subjects was definitely born in my early youth.
-Phil
Post Edited (Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)) : 3/17/2010 2:30:06 AM GMT
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Jim-
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So I saved up some money from my paper run and splashed out on an electronics kit. That ruined school for me because I became so engrossed in it. Components were very expensive and hard to get back then but my Mum bought me my first multimeter (20K/ohm!) as a present and soon after I was scrounging around for parts, even buying those old IBM computer boards from a disposal store for the transistors. I was naive as really but I would experiment and experiment, designing most things on paper and sometimes building it if I could. I had so much fun it would keep me up at nights. A small book from the library about building logic circuits using OC200 transistors and peg-board got me interested in digital electronics (I loved that book).
By the time microprocessors evaluation kits were hitting the streets in the late 70's I saved up and got a SC/MP eval board while I waited for my special 2650 PC1000 board. You know most of these boards were meant to be connected to a teletype or terminal but I had never seen one let alone used one so I got hold of a keyboard matrix (magic find) and designed a pcb for the keyboard encoder and serial output and etched the board myself. The output device used four or five quad 7-segment calculator LED displays that I had constructed into a rectangular plastic pipe elbow with a red perspex face, that was my display. Of course I had to type in machine code into the keyboard via the "monitor ROM" blind and very very carefully until I had enough code loaded to make it display anything. So primitive. Save and load were pretty much non-existent back then.
After that I planned big and designed a set of 6 pcbs by hand that were chockers full of TTL/HC chips to generate video etc. The schematics were scrawled across scores of sheets and crossed out and amended etc while I hand taped the pcb artwork onto film (with black tape only). I also designed the metal work and chassis and handed over a weeks wages to get that fabricated as well. The monitor was scrounged from my cherished "space helmet" b&w TV and an auto-reverse tape deck from my car for backup and loading. It was a big and very cool terminal computer and because I had never used one before I made the video generation programmable so I could fit one character on the screen or over 100 across or something like (can't remember) with programmable X and Y scale in hardware. I had a whole 2KB of RAM (using 1Kx1bit) for the video which was double anything back then had plus programmable characters as well. Remember, the fanciest part on the board was probably a character generator ROM, the rest was all logic gates. The big 2650 board plugged into it's own S100 style socket in a sub-chassis that held the pcb stack.
There were no real resources to turn to or people to ask, you just did it. That was my beginning in digital electronics and microprocessors.
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*Peter*
My parents left me sitting on the floor in a room with an electric train and a screwdriver...
I wanted to see what made it go!
By the time my parents got back, the train engine was taken apart and in about 4 or 5 pieces. They could not get it back together.
And that was the story for my early childhood. I took apart *everything* and could not get anything put back together.
Then as a teenager I started being able to put things back together so they worked again.
I learned a lot by taking things apart.
Dad lost his job with the local plumbing shop three weeks before Christmas.
(Being a minister, he felt that packing bottles of wine went against his religious beliefs and wasn't part of plumbing.)
Instead of going to work, he packed his tools like he would on any ordinary day and headed for the junkyard...
On Christmas morning I found a wrapped refrigerator box filled with automotive electronics, lights, switches, wire, etc.
and an old TV transformer which had had all of the high voltage outputs removed.
The church heard was was going on and supplied a bunch of the "normal" toys, but I spent more time
with that big box of junk. Best Christmas present ever and a good start into electronics.
He got his job back a week later with the condition that he didn't have to pack booze. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
(Of course I got one of those 101 electronics kits a year later.. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
OBC
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At 10 my Dad got me a 30 in 1 electronics kit that I loved to play with and learned a lot about electronics.
In grade 7 I built a solar tracker using a lot of standard gate ICs. Wish I had known about micro controllers back then but it was not until college that I got to play with one. a Motorola 78HC11.
Actually they can hold a charge for 6 months to a year after being unplugged. Be super careful with CRT picture tubes they are very dangerous.
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24 bit LCD Breakout Board now in. $24.99 has backlight driver and touch sensitive decoder.
If you have not already. Add yourself to the prophead map
It also sounded really cool and could shock the heck out of you!·
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Whit+
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
Post Edited (Whit) : 3/17/2010 4:56:25 AM GMT
I'm lucky that I had/have (I'm also lucky I still have them both) parents who, despite suffering years of dismantled gadgets, pandered to an inquisitive mind and some little person who always wanted to know just "Why" it did what it did. Aside from my parents, I'd rate Forest Mims III and Woz as my hero's [noparse]:)[/noparse]
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You only ever need two tools in life. If it moves and it shouldn't use Duct Tape. If it does not move and it should use WD40.
Post Edited (BradC) : 3/17/2010 1:09:35 PM GMT
I became an electronics recycler at an early age. My grandparents on my mother's side lived·near the edge of a state forest and it turned out that some individuals would pick remote spots to turn into their private dumps. I would go out with tools and bring back scavenged electrical and electronic parts.
Probably the only notable project of my childhood was building a helium-neon laser. The helium-neon part was in a sealed tube, so the project mainly consisted of building the HV power supply. The thing needed something like an extra 1500V kick to initially light up and I remember finding things to use as high voltage switches was a two part problem. Part one was not getting electrocuted. Part two was finding new ones, because everything I used burned out rather quickly.
-phar
From that I got one or 2 of the typical set of Tandy 1M-in-1 sets. Ended up in an Boy Scout Explorer group at Bell Labs/Indian Hill and learned programming on a PDP-15 using FOCAL. Then assembly for the PDP-8I. Fascinating times.
Ended up getting a Comp Sci degree in the late 70's and have always leaned towards the HW side, drivers, OS's, custom interfaces. All because of those damn TVs.
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Leon Heller
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Post Edited (Leon) : 3/17/2010 3:42:07 PM GMT
First interested? I'd say 1st or 2nd grade (mid-to-late 50's) when I strung 3 D cells in series to light up a flashlight bulb. Memory from there to high school is pretty mish-mash but I remember sneaking into the local auto junk yard and collecting any electronic oriented stuff for disassembly ("...disassemble Stephanie! Disassemble!"). Also had one of those 101 experimenter's kits from Heathkit that was a HUGE influence. I was an industrial arts nerd in high school and the electronics class cemented my future path. After HS, it was off to a tech college specifically for "electronics technology".
I certainly cannot complain about what I've learned, seen, and earned from the decisioin to persue a career in electronics.
DJ
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The class D amplifier was basically a 50kHz sawtooth oscillator driving a comparator, audio driving the other comparator input, and the output driving a power transistor from off to near saturation. My friend Tom Armour took the photo; I can't imagine how he came up with the "mad" moniker.
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Tracy Allen
www.emesystems.com
I was around 9yrs old when my dad walked in to catch me plugging a 110V plug in the wall, which I had cut off and attached test leads to some other component.
A made a modem (before I knew what a modem was) to transfer B&W pictures from a TRS80 Color Computer to an XT PC at age 12. It used the button inputs on a joystick port for the PC side. I don't remember what was on the old Color Computer side. There was no error checking, but it did transfer a 1kb?? picture!
About age 13-14 I made an actual computer oscilloscope, programmed in assembler through the joystick pot inputs. It run in monochrome CGA mode. It run at about 15kHz maximum sample rate. I was always impressed with myself because I got the inside loop down to 8 clock cycles.
Some time, I made an FM radio control receiver. It's the first time I had been exposed to PWM. It worked! I believe I used an old Atmel micro for the brains. although it wasn't very useful. I could never figure out how to get the Atmel independent of the development board running off a crystal.
I've made a couple bots and various things since then..... worked in electronics..... but I don't think I've made anything as cool as that stuff.
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"puff"...... Smile, there went another one.
Nine months out of high school (Feb 1991), I got a job as a temp at Hewlett Packard testing "brand new" 10/100 network interface cards. I soaked up things like a sponge because working there was a dream job for a gek like me and I interacted with engineers on a daily basis. I worked there for just over 4 years as a temp and did everything from testing, rework soldering, running SMT equipment, debugging terminal displays (only bit once by a flyback, but with ESD footstraps on, it hurts!), creating documentation, and doing a lot of design feedback for the product engineers.
I started college (2 yr degree from ARC) while at HP and finished while I was at Packard Bell NEC. I left HP for a permanent job with benefits since I was going to be getting married. Worked at Packard Bell NEC for 4 1/2 years running SMT lines and moved into engineering where I climbed the career stairway (I actually doubled my salary in the time I was there, $9.25/hr in 1995 to $19.47/hr in 1999), then went to a contract manufacturer called Varian Electronics Mfg before PBNEC closed down. Worked there for over 5 years until they were bought out by Jabil and the plant was closed up since Jabil already had a plant in the same area. Been at my current employer for almost 5 years now and manage the process engineering department for an electronics contract manufacturer. So, been involved with circuit board manufacturing for 19 years now and still love to play with the stuff.
To this day, I still tear things apart just to see what makes them tick. It's more so now to fix them or to hack them. (My easy button on my desk at work is hacked and has my daughter's voice saying "Love you daddy, good job daddy!". Much better than the original.)
My daughter is only 4 but already shows signs of her daddy's curiosity with electronics and tools. She actually has her own toolbag and tools from Home Depot (her favorite store right now, how awesome is that?!?!). She loves to be with me when I am working on anything Parallax and is always ready to "push the red button".
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Andrew Williams
WBA Consulting
WBA-TH1M Sensirion SHT11 Module
Special Olympics Polar Bear Plunge, Mar 20, 2010
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Leon Heller
Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Were the upstairs and downstairs establishments part of the same business, e.g. "Parts 'n' Tarts"?
-Phil
I had disassembled in record time to my Mom's shock. I wanted
the motors inside. In fourth grade, I could actually put things back
together and so I repaired HO-Gauge racing cars for neighbors.
I figured out how to rebuild their tiny engines and refurbish the
brushes. It helped earn money for parts to build my ham radio
one tube transmitter and short wave radio receivers. However,
flash back to age 5 when I built my 1st talking robot from tin
cans and parts. At age 7, I set up my first electronics lab -
a desk with parts from old radios, tvs and things taken apart.
Liquid solder from a tube was used to build circuits at first before
discovering the soldering iron. Before using liquid solder, I used
conductive tin foil from a kitchen roll to make circuits. I remember
fixing a lot of radios for neighbors for free and it earned me a lot
of new friends. Everyone had a broken radio. I remember taking
walkie talkies and converting them to receive airplanes overhead.
I learned a lot by reading Radio Electronics and S9, then began
reading the ARRL magazine and built a base CB radio, two more short
wave receivers, and many electronic circuits, amplifiers, recorders,
radios, oscillators, and various projects. That Lafeyette Electronics
parts catalog was really amazing. They had a surplus section with
interesting things for electronics experimenting.
humanoido
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=464494
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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering
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I started at the age of eight years old with Radio Shack electronic kits. I figured, why build the circuits in the box. I started using card board as a backing, using an ice pick to poke holes in it for componet leads, and learned to solder.
This lead to making PC boards. First using electrical tape as the resistive element. Radio Shack sold direct transfers and feric cloride etchant.
I'm now 45 years old. I work in industrial maintenance troubleshooting and repairing PLC systems in a manufacturing plant.
My hobby has gotten me a long way.
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