Hi! This is my fourier into the wonderfully exciting world of blogging. I’ll be describing my adventures in electronics prototyping and gadget making.  I’m not expecting a wide audience here — I decided to create this mainly for me to keep a history of my projects as reference in the future. Perhaps others interested in creating gadgets will find it interesting too. (I’m really sorry for the pun by the way.)

My goal for this blog is to offer some commentary as I iterate through ideas and designs for my projects. One thing I noticed from trying to figure this stuff out on my own was that information was difficult to find and even harder to put to use. I intend on writing at least some of this to be helpful for a beginner, sharing some mistakes I’ve made and tips that I’ve found out. Hopefully some of the information will be useful someday to someone as a resource.

Note that I’m really just a wannabe EE. They don’t teach us this stuff in the ECE curriculum here at CMU, which is to be expected. However, there was an awesome student-taught course called Gadgetry 101, where they taught us the basics and let us create our own gadget on a PCB. Since it wasn’t an actual full-time class, we didn’t get to learn much in-depth. So, I only have a vague idea of what I’m doing. But there are lots of resources out there, and hopefully I’ve picked up on some good practices by now.

I’ll describe the gadget I made in that StuCo in a later post — it’s a (poorly designed) large RGB LED display. I don’t think the teachers liked me very much for having no idea what I wanted to do and just creating a silly LED array; I’ve heard that they have since discouraged others from doing it. However, I do credit that class for inspiring me to learn more about electronics, more so than the ECE program here has encouraged (although they are trying!)

Anyways, I’ll start first with my current project in my next post. Hint: it’s yet another RGB LED display; I’m not very original.