July 2016

Background

I have been interested in electricity and electronics from about the age of 8 years old, or perhaps younger. I learned to use a soldering iron around that time, and had one of my own in high school. I used to collect old circuit boards and de-solder the components to add to my collection. I read up on how a transistor worked and created a circuit with 2 motors. When I spun the one motor, the other one turned, much faster. I loved motors back then, and still do!

After school I worked for an industrial control panel manufacturing company as a Panel Wirer, then in the Hoover factory in South Africa as an Assistant Electrician. After that I decided to study Electrical Engineering, which I did at Port Elizabeth Technikon, which is now the Nelson Mandella University.

I went on to worked in the electronics industry for 5 years, designing industrial battery charging systems and power supplies, before becoming interested in computers and switching careers to IT. I would have loved to continue electronic engineering in the field of robotics, but the lure of IT in the mid-nineties was strong, and computers were fun!

At the time, I taught myself assembler (machine code) programming for the Microchip PIC
range of microcontrollers. A microcontroller is essentially a relatively simple self-contained computer in a microchip or IC (integrated circuit). This is a powerful solution for digital control in a circuit and these areused everywhere today.

I used one of these in an advanced charging system I designed for the hobby racing industry.

Today

Electronics has remained a hobby of mine, and I have a large collection of components of all types. I have all the tools I need for building complex circuitry, including several digital multimeters, oscilloscopes, powerf supplies, etc.

I have a PC based oscilloscope by Cleverscope, which doubles up as a logic analyser.

More to follow…