Why Electronics and Why Start Now?

I'm starting out out learning about electronics at age 62, and it's all Pfizer's fault!

Now I've got plenty of interests other than electronics: dog walking, playing the guitar, composing electronic music and programming in Delphi Pascal. (You can check those out on my music YouTube channel, my blog - Alo Phogg's Music Blogg, on Bandcamp and my programming site if you're interested).

But I'm retired. I've got plenty of time and was feeling the need for a new hobby that was a bit different from the others. Eventually I settled on making a scenic diorama. I'd done one before about thirty years ago and thought I'd have another go.

Having constructed a building kit I thought it would be nice to light it. So I went off and read about how to wire up LEDs, thinking I'd just wire a few to an old 12V DC power controller I have lying around. Well they were bright!

This brings us to April 2021 and it's where Pfizer come in. I'd just had second Covid vaccination and was feeling particularly grotty afterwards. I didn't feel up to doing much but browse the net. So I decided to find out how to dim the LEDs in my building. Google led me down the rabbit hole of micro-processor control and PWM and regulated power supplies and ... I was hooked!

Off went an order to Elegoo for their basic Uno starter kit and I had a happy few days going through the projects, despite the slip-shod documentation. And then started casting around for some project ideas I could adopt or adapt. I've found one, maybe two ... but that will have to wait for another post.

And that's the tale of how, thanks to Pfizer, I got two new hobbies for the price of one.

Now don't go getting the feeling that I'm down on Pfizer or the vaccination. On the contrary, thanks to them and the marvellous Welsh National Health Service, I got a 95% chance of immunity from Covid 19 and a new hobby all for the sake of feeling a bit ill for a couple of days! Pretty good trade off I think.

Comments

Total Overkill - Controlling Diorama Lighting With A Microcontroller

I'm building a scenic model - a diorama indeed. In fact this diorama is the reason I got interested in electronics in the first place. You see the model will have a few buildings & they'll all be lit with LEDs. There may also be some motorised gimmicks if I can get them to work. The problem was that I didn't know how to wire up LEDs, so hit Google and disappeared down an electronics rabbit hole. The original plan that was to have a simple set of circuits where each LED had a potentiometer to adjust the brightness along with a fixed resistor to protect the LED. The LEDs would be switched on and off using some slider switches that I got from an electronics surplus shop many moons ago. All would be powered from an old model railway 12V power controller I've had since I was a teenager. Yep, it's old! But that'd be too simple wouldn't it? So now I'm planning to electronicify it. Not that it needs doing of course, but it'll be more fun. The plan is to...

A Sort-Of-Theremin - Another Project?

Yep, even before getting anywhere near completing my first project I've got an idea for a second. In my defence, they're both related. The idea is to construct a Theremin-like instrument. Theremin-like because my idea uses a slightly different principle to control it. So, what's a real Theremin? Briefly it's an instrument that uses radio waves to deduce the proximity of the player's hands to two aerials: one that controls pitch and another that controls volume. It uses the capacitance of the human body to determine the hand's position relative to the aerials. There's much more info on howstuffworks . My idea is to use the same capacitive sensing as is planned for my first project, the Electro Tongue Drum . But, instead of detecting an actual touch on a key I'm hoping to use the fact that the metal sensor can detect the proximity of a finger or hand. While a real Theremin uses radio waves to detect the position of the player's hand mine w...

My 1st Project - Say Hello to the "Electro Tongue Drum"

The electro-what? If you've read my previous post you'll know I'm an amateur musician of sorts. I play guitar, fumble with keyboards and have a liking for weird and off beat instruments. Canjo anyone? One such instrument is the Tongue Drum (aka Tank Drum, aka Hank Drum). I fancied buying one, but a decent one isn't cheap, so I couldn't justify the cost given the small amount of use I'd have for it. But how about an electronic emulation of one? I got the idea when I was down the rabbit hole looking at lots of other peoples projects online. I stumbled across the paper piano project. The person who built this simply drew the keyboard on cardboard and filled in the keys with pencil "lead". Those "keys" were connected to a wire using a paper clip, of all things, and the wire was attached to an Arduino Uno micro-controller via a large value resistor. The Arduino can then sense when a finger touches one of the pencilled in keys and play a (horri...

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