Hello from Kevin (username Aubey) in Montreal (QC)

First,I want to thank Bill for accepting me in the group and for all the great instruction he provides. I stumbled upon this site while looking for information about rotary encoders, and have been a regular visitor ever since. Dronebot Workshop combines great material with a comprehensive and professional quality presentation.

I am a mostly retired IT guy, but I still work for some old clients on occasion. My interest in microcontrollers stems originally from an interest in coding at a very basic hardware level. During my career I worked mostly in the DBA, Programming, Network Admin, System Architecture and Management areas, with some time in R&D. The closest I got to hardware was swapping modems, RAM and the once stupidly difficult to install network adapters, but that was early in my career. I also once rescued a very expensive network switch by replacing a 3 dollar fan, Digikey made me buy a few fans to make a minimum order amount, but it was still way cheaper than a new switch.

A couple of immediate drivers for learning about electronics, MCUs and single board computers, are wanting to build a RPI based open source navigation and chart plotter for my sailboat, and that I find robots fascinating. As a high school science fair project, my youngest son and I built and programmed an autonomous robot based on the MIT Cricket Handy board and parts from old toys and disused computers. But that was almost twenty years ago and the board was simple to use.

At present, I mostly play with Arduinos, as I find there is a ton of support, including this excellent site. But I have a few other boards that I will eventually get around to, once I have mastered the Arduino. My current project is another autonomous robot project based on an Arduino Uno, whatever DC motor driver I can actually get to work (not much luck yet with an Adafruit motor shield or a TB6612 board), a couple of DC motor/Wheels from Amazon, a small caster wheel, a Sharp GP2YA41SK0F range finder and a recycled plastic Ferrero Roché container from Christmas as a body. It looks a bit like a toy tractor, but has plenty of space for sensors and blinky lights.

I look forward to getting to know the folks on this site and learning about your projects.