Hello from Eastern Pennsylvania

My name is Tom. I live in Pennsylvania near the Delaware Water Gap.

About 45 years ago I trained to be an Electronics Technician. Two years of school at a small electronics tech school got me a job fixing computers for Digital Equipment Corporation. After a couple of years I transferred to software but I have always liked working with electronics.

When the clocks got set back last November I had to go around the house updating the timers we use to turn lamps on and off. I have been updating the time on these twice a year and updating the programming frequently during fall and spring as sunrise and sunset times change. I figured it was time for a change.

I started researching Home Assistant and setup a server on an old laptop. After experimenting with it for a while I decided to take the plunge. I bought a Raspberry Pi to run it on. Before setting it up I played around with the Pi a little and thought it was kind of interesting. I bought a second Pi and a starter kit of modules to play with.

Hooking up all of these circuits took me back to tech school. Back then we used a Heathkit ET-3400 which was a Motorola 6800 with a breadboard on it. We built circuits to interface with the computer and wrote programs to drive the circuits. Now I'm doing the same thing with much more advanced and complicated equipment.

So now I'm building sensors and controls based on ESP32 for Home Assistant. Thanks to the videos here I became aware of power supply modules that I used to build a couple of power supplies for my breadboards. I've also learned about some components we didn't use all that much back in tech school like MOSFETs and IR. I hope I can remember enough of what I learned about electronics to be a useful contributor here.