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When I was a kid, I liked to open the cases of my electronic toys to see what's inside. I was looking at a PCB helplessly without any chance of understanding what's there. Also, when the analog TV broke, my parents called an electrician. I was peering into the fascinating world of his work out of which I still don't understand much today 🤭

The lowest level I ever got into

When I was at University, the deepest level of computing I studied were the logic gates. With a colleague, I even developed Logic Circuit Designer, an app which helps you simulate logic circuits. These are based on boolean algebra and form the foundations of computing. During my studies, I concentrated more on Information Technologies and then during my work on high end languages like C# or Javascript. These require no electronics knowledge, you are just a keyboard warrior.

Embedded Software Engineer: C under Linux

I had the opportunity at the start of my career to work for a company as an Embedded Software Engineer, coding in C under Linux. More than coding, it required you to know how to connect pins, read simple electronic diagrams and understanding communication protocols (such as RS232).

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What I enjoyed the most with that company is that I did something practical, which you can notice and feel, unlike let's say an accounting software which is quite dull 🚂🚃🚃🚃🚃.

Back to contemporary times

Now these days, I feel the need to do something practical as well, just like the good old days. I am attracted to IoT, automations and embedded systems. I have some ideas for home & gardening projects, therefore in my home you can find:

  • 1 Raspberry PI 4 (8GB of RAM)
  • 1 Raspberry PI 5 (16GB of RAM - a powerhorse)
  • 2 Raspberry PI Pico 2W - one with soldered pins, one without
  • 1 PicoCalc from Clockworks -

And I also ordered some electronics learner kits with resistors, transistors and LEDs. All for my plan to do something else rather than clicking and typing all day long 😂.

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You can check out my YouTube in order to see more about the circuits that I managed to create.

The 5 benefits of upskilling

These benefits that I enumerate here come more as to how I feel after starting this journey.

  1. My creativity is boosted: I do feel that my full-time job doesn't allow me to be that creative. It's one of the most restricted environments that I've worked in. I cannot change that, so I see my electronics learner journey as a way to express my creativity like I never would in my job.
  2. I write more efficient code: might sound counter-intuitive, but to me it's very true. I feel that I can write more efficient code since I understand that these machines regardless of size, memory or CPU they are limited. When you code in high-end languages like Python, Java or C# you disconsider the memory burden and CPU usage of your code. When you think of the machine from a lower end language like C you realize that the penalty of inefficient code is cruel.
  3. Combat brain overdrive: just coding and coding on a computer with a lot of notifications and distractions will exhaust you very fast. On embedded machines, you don't have the "privilege" of appealing graphics nor you get distracted by system updates, emails notifications and so on. You just get into the amazing universe of computing and that's it: raw, pure and nostalgic!
  4. Speaking of nostalgic, yeah, nostalgia: the generation who's now over or around 40s is a generation raised without smartphone or high speed internet. Youngsters will never know how it is to play a tape-casette, what it means to insert a diskette and hear that noise of the reader. We just take many things for granted, there were times when if you wanted to have a good music collection, you needed to take the hard drive to a friend and copy over the MP3 files (you had to set up the master-slave jumper thing as well)
  5. Developing something useful: I'm very attracted to the idea of developing useful projects combining hardware and software efficiently in order to achieve something useful, maybe I can invent something that will change someones life, who knows. An example in this regard is the Apple company which controls both hardware and software. Their products are top-notch, just like my aspirations 😎👌🔥

A retro future

I am quite content with what I learned so far. The more you learn, the more you realize that you know very little. Electronics have changed our life and they will continue to do so. By applying boosted creativity with efficiency to deliver something useful I try to deliver projects which can change someone's life. All without distractions, cunning marketing strategies or annoying commercials. That's my goal and aspiration!

If you have interesting project ideas or if you want to collaborate, send me a message in the contact page. I'd be glad to be in touch! Cheers!