To start things off I thought I should write a few foundational articles so there is some (hopefully useful) content here before I dig into blogging. So I wrote the 5 articles you see in the menu (and listed below). Most cover topics in basic electronics and microcontrollers, but one indulges one of my hobbies (computer history — I collect ancient computer hardware).

Learning about electronics was a bit out of my comfort zone. I’m a Computer Scientist. I’m also pretty good at acting like a Software Engineer. I am no Electronics Engineer. I struggled to find good references for a lot of this stuff when I tried to teach myself and build small electronic devices to automate my home (many years before before you could buy these things anywhere for $20USD). I hope some software person who wants to try hardware will find this material useful. Please give me feedback so I can improve this material for others.

Here’s a summary of what these first articles are about.

• From Sticks To Chips — The evolution of the modern transistor… historical stuff… some collectables.
• Obey The Law — Ohm’s Law and how to use it to design basic circuits that won’t fry your components.
• Fun With Transistors — How to use transistors to enable your single board computers to switch larger loads their GPIO pins can’t handle.
• Analog vs Digital — Basic theory for data acquisition from analog sources (i.e., from any real world source).
• ArduinoPi — Mating an Arduino to a Raspberry Pi to make something much greater.