Hi, I'm Jay and am glad to be here!

Glad you enjoy the videos Jay, welcome to the forum!

😎

Bill

Posted by: @jaytrent

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I have really enjoyed the youtube videos, and am glad to be joining in with the forum.

 

hi @jaytrent, Welcome to the forum..Indeed, Bill's videos are a masterful piece of work , as well as artful too!  I have enjoyed this tutorials for a long while now, and look forward to seeing what he has new in store for us..Lets us hear from you on what projects you are interested in, and any help, or advice you can give us on your own experiences.

Regards,

LouisR

Welcome to the forum Jay, yes the videos are great, but don't forget the article as well, sometimes it has additional info. Click on ...more under the video then the first link (usually) is the article link.

So true; I should have mentioned that I have spent a lot of time reading and learning there as well. Probably more time in the articles for that matter...!

@inst-tech Good question...I have been a software test engineer for (checks calendar) coming up on 24 years.  While I have generally enjoyed my work, it has generally been focused on a small portion of a much much larger product.  Kinda like being the guy who watches another guy tighten a certain set of screws on a large freight train every now and then.

I love working on my own projects at home, building up something end-to-end now.  

To be more specific, as I approach retirement my wife and I are starting a side business doing woodworking, and I have been using Dronebotworkshop's article on building an air quality monitor as a starting point.  I also want to build some automation for dust collection and blast gates in the shop.  I love the idea of having a website served from an esp32 providing an overview of the shop with multiple air quality sensors, state of the dust collection system, and hopefully some other stuff TBD.  Probably not GPS-enabled since my tablesaw shouldn't be moving around much ;-).

Anyway, we still all stand on the shoulders of others, in this case Bill, the manufacturers who pack so much power into little $5 chips, the open source folks who have provided such great device libraries, etc. so it isn't like I'm doing it all myself in any way, however from the functional side I really loving thinking about a product or tool and knowing that it could be in reach for not too much money (but a lot of work).

@jaytrent Wow, they have such things as a 'software test engineer'? What engineering school did you attend? My curiosity is piqued, as the only 'testing' we did was to run the same data through the new/modified code as the production version and then spot check the results. For big changes they might assign one of the girls to spend the entire day for some small number of days comparing the test terminal to the production terminal.

The product was the global unified stock ticker feed. A mistake could be quite serious so we never made any.

Hi Ron @zander,

  Software test is not my area, but my understanding for high integrity/safety critical applications, writing and modifying the actual code, in terms of person-hours and other resources, is only a tiny fraction of the task. The majority of the cost is related to "V and V" - verification and validation, both of which involve forms of testing.

From Wikipedia:

Verification and validation are not the same thing, although they are often confused. Boehm succinctly expressed the difference as^[1]

• Verification: Are we building the product right?

• Validation: Are we building the right product?

I'll leave the experts to provide any further explanation you may need, but I can assure you, a short manual regression test of the final code to look for a newly introduced problem would not even begin to meet present expectations, and in many cases, certification requirements.

Best wishes my friend, Dave

@jaytrent Indeed, I used to do woodworking as a hobby, 20 years ago..but have sold most of my equipment as I'm getting too old ( 77 ) for mess'n around with high speed saws ..hehehe

I worked at a Paper mill for the last 30 years of my career, mostly with Industrial instrumentation for automated systems.. Sensors like measuring flow, pressure, temperature,Level and a bunch of analyzers types.. Before that I was in heavy industrial construction (15 years) doing the same thing..Started out in the US Navy 1965 (4 year) as an Electronics Tech in EWS ( Electronic Weapons Sytems) And ASW ( Anti-Submarine Weapons), D.A.S.H. ( Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopters) ..yea, imagine that, drones in the 1960's...lol

A couple of years ago, I found this sight and renewed by interest in electronics and micro-processors..although quite different than the ones I worked with in my job, the principals are the same. I think you'll enjoy all the things you can do with these MPU's, and sensors, it's what ever you can Imagine.. I'm currently working on a project to display a Radar screen on a 2.8" TFT LCD display using a Elegoo ATmega 2560, and an HC-SR04 Ultrasonic distance sensor. When Finshed, I'll update in the Project Corner/Show & Tell..

Regards,

LouisR