How We All Got Here

[BrownOut]

Man, mofetkiller, you sound a whole lot older than grade 10. Alot of my friends could't relate to my interest in electronics, unless I could do something cool, like a bright flashing strobe light or produce a leaping arc. They still aren't interested. Hmmm...

 

[davidbball13]

How many of you have been electronics enthuasts from an early age, I have noticed that there is nobody within 1000 km of me that gives a rats a** about it. I owe most of my knowledge to learning electronics from the internet and forums like this. I am in grade 10 and here is the only place where I can mention electronics without getting some really strange looks . Anyway, enough about my problems, lets discuss how we all became electronics enthuasts.

Haha I'm in the same grade as you! I just turned 15 a few months ago. I started like you. Just looking around on the internet. Reading this and many other forums. and learning by trial and error. No one that I know has anything to do with electronics or could care about it....sucks.

Mosfet killer. Where are you located? And yeah in 8th grade I made over 200 bucks selling usb chargers powered by a 9 volt battery. They did not work very well at all but I sold so many of them to kids in school. Then teachers were thinking I was selling drugs.....So I stopped. Ha I use to fix peoples iPods all the time. Their so simple fixed half the time.

 

[k7elp60]

I don't recall exactly my age when I started in electronics, but I'm sure it was the 5th or 6th grade. Transistors and semiconductor rectifiers may have been invented then but they were not availible commercially. I learned my electronics initially on vacuum tubes. I remember when the first commercially available transistor was, it was a ck722 by Raytheon. I paid about 4 dollars for it in the early 1950's.
My hobby turned into a career with the U.S. Coast Guard. Spent 26 years on active duty, retired from the Coast Guard over 20 years ago and have kept active in the hobby and even designed and built a number of devices that sold commercially.
My eyesight and my manual dextarity are suffering, I'm looking for a younger person that lives close to teach my skills and knowledge and share my large supply of parts with.

 

[CalebG]

Some great stories in here, I got an early start at the age of 10 one of my dads friends gave me an old broken vacuum tube radio, I of course dismantled it and was able to find a broken connection and had a radio for free. I have been fixing stuff ever since, I got into telephony and electricity shortly after high school. Recently been experimenting with electronics again to make a lightning trigger for my camera. I have added to my knowledge off the web and from reading. To anyone getting started I recommend The Evil Genius' Guide to Electronics, in fact the whole series is a great read my personal favorite is the High Tech Practical Jokes.. great stuff in there. I look forward to sharing ideas and learning more from everyone here.

Caleb

 

[Karkas]

Very interesting your stories, I remember that when I was going to start my highschool in september 2001 I chose the electronics course that my school had available, I only learned to make circuits in my breadboard and some therems, I studied it for 3 years until I changed my course becuase I needed one more year if I finished my electronics course and I used to play baseball, I wanted to be a professional player and that "extra" year would have interferred with my possible signing, anyway. I graduated and left the baseball and went back to electronics starting my engineering career, but I didn't know anything about the forums until one year ago when I was trying to make a project and I couldn't find any help, and I found it in the forums, I also owe a lot of my knowledge to the experts in there. I would have really liked to be like MOSFET KILLER and davidball, you can see that they have a great thirst of knowledge just like I had, but given that I am in a very underdeveloped country, and it is not even looking forward to change that (Venezuela), the culture that surrounds me wouldn't lead me to the right places to find it, I am 19 years old, and I am very advanced compared to my classmates and even other students in higher semesters but not very much compared to other students in the world with the same "thirst of knowledge", I am still looking everyday for it I joined this community a few months ago, and it seems to be my second university even when I hadn't have enough time to go to class here, haha.

 

[Mikebits]

Interesting how most of the stories describe one as having an affinity towards electrons, or electronics at such a young age.

For me, electronics was a way out of chipping paint off a ships hull. In my thinking it was just a job, never hated it nor did I love it. Perhaps that is why I left the profession, and now working towards the medical industry.

 

[jpanhalt]

@Pommie,

Interesting history. Did you ever cross paths with Redline Games? One of my nephews owned that, in about the same period as your company.

As for me, I am just a hobbyist. Started in 4th grad (1952) building my own transmitters for RC models. Had lots of old TV's, etc. to tear apart. Got some TI, Knight, and Heath kits early on. In college, had a one-credit course on introductory laboratory electronics. That was my first introduction to "op-amps," which used vacuum tubes at the time. During my working years, I built an occasional device, e.g., an electrochemical detector for HPLC. About 10 years ago, I got more heavily into electronics and more recently into PIC's, particularly after retirement. Almost all of my projects have been related in some way to my obsession with airplanes.

John

 

[Pommie]

Hi John,

Unfortunately, I never crossed paths with Redline. It's not really surprising as there were so many companies back then. I see he was involved in lots of games clicky. Is he still in the games industry?

Mike.

 

[jpanhalt]

That's him. He sold his part of the company a few years ago. John

 

[tytower]

Me . I fix anything broken . Jack of all trades Just came as part of the learning how . Liked it and did a uni course full time for a year to look see. Did another year at law , and another at Physics.

Its a great life aint it.

 

[Vizier87]

I started out when I read a book about making your own motor when I was 15. I did it with my brother but it didn't work, but that's the starting point. Later in my undergraduate years I built a working motor using scraps for an assignment which required us to study motor specs, but I branched out for more challenge.

VORTEX ELECTRICA: Construct your own motor!

Cheers.

 

[psecody]

Well my interest in electronics started at an early age as well. As a young kid I would like to tear my broken toys apart and see what was inside them. As I grew older my dad mentioned what some of the discrete parts were, like resistors and LED's and such. But my dad really didn't know that much about it. I got a 50 in 1 kit and built all the projects but didn't really learn anything from it besides that hooking an led straight up to a battery will fry it pretty fast haha. In boy scouts I did a merit badge on electronics and built a continuity tester with an led and a resistor and a 9v battery and I was hooked, I think it was the soldering that I liked the most because I was really good at it for my age and so over the years I just worked to compact my continuity testers size. I also had to learn how to fix all of my stuff when it broke because my parents never would buy me another one if it broke.

I was interested in electronics but that was back before the internet was in every home, heck our schools didn't even really have internet till 7th grade. So with not really any other way to learn I took an electronics class my freshman year.... what a mistake, the teacher never would teach us anything because me and another student in the class that I became friends with "would use whatever he taught us for mischief" so mainly my friend and I (redcore on the boards I think) pretty much just figured stuff out for ourselves. All that class did was let us solder a couple of those "legoesque" kits and build a stupid speaker box. One thing did happen that year though, we got calculators (TI-82's) and we started learning how to program. The next year we advanced to C++ and have been doing that since.

After high school I was going to school for architectural engineering but still had an interest in electronics so me and my friend bought PIC programmers and it opened up a whole new area of electronics to play with, the possibilities seemed endless. After my first year of college I changed my major to electrical engineering and this is actually my first year to take any classes related to electronics.

 

[phalanx]

My mother says that when I was a baby, I was facinated by light bulbs and the switches that turn them on. When I was old enough to walk, I wanted to push buttons on the TV and VCR. When my dexterity had improved, I started taking things apart and putting them back together to figure out how they worked. When my reading skills improved, I started reading books like The Way Things Work and other titles of similar material. The progression continues to this day.

From day one, my parents pretty much knew that I would end up in the engineering world but not what field I would study. For a long time I was torn. I had interests in the medical world, mechanical, and electrical engineering. I still remember the hoopla when the original Pentium processor was released. I could not comprehend how a piece of silicon that was a little larger than a half inch square could run over 100,000,000 million instructions in a second. From there on out, I was hooked on digital logic so I went to college for electrical engineering where I properly learned the basics in analog and digital design. I ended up liking both realms and focused on control engineering and embedded system design.

 

[pasanlaksiri]

There is nothing much to say about my self. Im born with it ( Still im not a expert either )

 

[gabeNC]

But you have beautiful eyes.