Learning stuff long forgotten

Having two school aged kids has made me realise how much stuff I've forgotten from my school days. I'm shocking at math, don't have a clue what they're going on about with English homework and am pretty terrible on the science front.

One of my favourite subjects back in the day (30 odd years ago now) was electronics. One of my final projects was a 4ft model of the Eiffel Tower with lots of lighting fitted. The lights didn't do anything fancy, but I was still chuffed with it.

I was browsing eBay for Christmas presents at the beginning of the week and found Electronics for Dummies for just over a fiver; I couldn't resist. The wife was busy with a training course yesterday so I'd be running the kids around to gymnastic classes, of course they can't be in the same one, so knew I'd have a good few hours in sat in the car waiting around.

I managed to make good progress. I quite enjoy the "for Dummies" books as, well I'm the perfect audience. They can be a bit silly, even pathetic in places but they aren't generally a dry read. Refreshing on how differently electrons behave around the nucleus of atoms between conductors and insulators was jolly interesting. I read on last night and woke up wanting to do something practical. It was time to break out the Arduino.

Ok, following instructions and shoving components in a breadboard is hardly hardcore engineering and to be honest, I still didn't really have a clue what's going on. I was fun all the same though and I decided to get a little festive.

Playing about with the Arduino IDE is always a bit of fun and usually ends up with me breaking the code. The above was the second project of the day with the first being setting up a buzzer and controlling its buzzing with the heat of my hand.

Watch out Steve Wozniak!