Hi New Member Rich Owen

Hello everyone. I'm not overly great at this normally, but Bills lovely welcome email has Inspired me to speak out and say hi.

A bit about me, eek.....

I've grown up with electronics, thanks to my awesome Dad. I was playing with thyristors at 6, was soldering by 10 and set fire to my room not long after 😮 

I seemed to miss computers in college and stuck with electronics but soon found computer hardware awesome. Mainly fixing and building the best rigs I could.

Since college been doing service engineer roles (jack of all trades type, computer, electronics, light mechanical, now lasers) and never found the time for programming.

Discovered a love of 3D modelling due a RC boat building phase and bought a few printers 😆 

In my previous roll I managed to get on a visual basic course and it was awesome. How Have I missed this part of life. Its not a glamorous language but easy to get good results

Then I discovered Arduino. Again how have I missed this, it seems a obvious choice now, coding and electronics 🤨 

I love it. I used to be quite a heavy gamer, but this has dominated my time since. This is now my waking and sleeping life (dreaming of code is not good). My wife has perfected her "that's lovely dear" and scowls whenever another packet of goodies arrives for my projects. 

I've been playing with C++ and Arduino for nearly 2 years now. It is the most amazing bit of kit a tinkerer like me could ask for. 

The old days of drawing and etching a PCB is now happily behind me and I'm building PCBs on EasyEDA and using JLCPCB now.

My latest plaything is ESP32, what a beast. Today 7/1/22, I discovered how to assign a specific core to a heavy task leaving the other to do the donkey work. Wow, one core ripping through a loop at 6Mhz and the other Driving a slow OLED library. Its heaven.

I only wish I discovered all this 20 years ago and that I could entice my 13 year old boy into it. I cant get his attention on it for more than 2 minutes. I've had to give into the idea he's just not a builder or tinkerer 😞 

That said I'm no builder either, So far most of my project have been started, the hard bits worked out, perfected and then parked. Then another project. Not ideal but ill get there eventually. Its all a learning curve.

I must be learning because whenever I look back at my old code, I'm confused why I did it the way I did and I'm often heard saying "how did that ever work" 🤣 

Anyway I hope I've not board you guys too much and hope to chat with you all at some point. I'm sure I will be picking your brains soon but would also love to be of assistance to someone someday. 

Take care and keep tinkering.

Rich Owen