Launching the Embedded Enthusiast blog

Welcome to the Embedded Enthusiast, a blog dedicated to having fun with embedded electronics. I am an IT professional, with a degree in Electronics Technology. As a young teenager I dabbled in electronics building kits such as AM/FM radios, Electronic Light Show and playing with fiber optics experiments. My favorite magazines in those days were Radio Electronics and Popular Electronics. Radio Shack and Digikey were my favorite places to shop. I purchased a Timex Sinclar computer with 16K of memory and a cassette tape for storing programs. And there was some sort of magazine like SYNC or something that explained machine level programming on the tiny computer. I used to dream of Heath Kit projects like the robot on the front of the catalog with the extended arm on the head. I stopped dabbling with electronics after getting married and having kids. The advent of surface mounted components seemed to do in the hobbyist. Lately, I have become interested in embedded electronics. There are so many cool projects to play with and the price of the components and the ease of use is very attractive for the home enthusiast. That said I purchased 4 Texas Instruments Launch pads and three of the EZ430RF2500T wireless development kits. These devices are extremely cheap and open source with lots of sample code, resources and tools. The initial project I will be highlighting on this blog is a Mini-Quad copter using the Launchpad and an EZ430 RF for wireless remote control. Watch for posts that report the progress on the quad copter and provide some of the technical aspects that are learned along the way. If you find this blog entertaining or informative please be sure to drop me a line or comment. Embedded Enthusiast or Mad scientist. I am not sure which I am.