Hi from Belgium!

I retired 10 years ago; last job was as tech support specialist for a local company (“best job in the company” a colleague told me. I enjoyed fixing the equipment & got to travel all over the world!)..

I started taking stuff apart when I was 4, then progressed to building things.

My first computer experience was at Loughborough University (UK) in 1968. As part of the maths course, we had to learn some FORTRAN so we could use the Uni’s ICL1905 with 80-col cards in our other studies. I wasn’t interested until we had an afternoon practical session on the machine, & then I was hooked!

I started work in ‘68 with Burroughs Machines (now Unisys), then with Marconi, moved to Belgium in ‘76, built & operated test equipment for industrial circuits in 2 small Belgian companies, & had my own company for a while (biggest computer manufacturer in the village!).

I was a finalist in a robot car competition in Paris in 1980, & built a series of small mobile robots for a friend who was studying the behavior of ants(!) at university. We did demos of these gadgets during the European Conference on Artificial Life in May ‘93. I started using Z-World’s Rabbit modules (& C+) around 20 years ago, embedding them in a controller for security cash drawers for banks.

Now, it’s Arduino time! Biggest project so far is an XYZ controller for my bench drill. I needed some precision drilling for a game I was making. A friend thought I was making dominoes, so I said “why not?”, & had 2 sets finished 3 weeks later. I made a reversing detector for my car for when the bike rack is fitted, & I’m currently working on a system for checking the level of the blocks of salt in our water softener. The device runs once a day (24-hour time switch), & if it’s the pre-set day, it sends me an E-mail with the measurements (using ToF laser sensors).