2018 was the year I began my journey in learning electronics. Originally, I had an interest in computers and computer components, so I was typically found tinkering with computer hardware and making video game servers for some games me and my siblings enjoyed playing.

Later down the road, in 9th grade, I registered to an electronics course. This course introduced me to all the various electronic circuit components used to make a functional device. When I finished the course work early, I would tinker and occasionally experiment at home as well.

Febuary 2018

My first electronic project was an audio reactive LED.

March 2018

Initially I had an interest in computers, software, and how they functioned. I had an old desktop that I would experiment with for instance, loading different operating systems such as Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, and making servers for some popular video games I would play with friends. Around this time I learned a lot about the command line in windows.

My first attempt at working with an active electronics component was making this audio amplifier. I had no clue how these magic little three legged components worked, but I gave it my best shot while following resources online. I soldered this circuit together onto a cut piece of plastic from a milk jug. It was quite a start, and no, it did not work... as expected...

April 2018

In April 2018, I created a stulus pen by using an old mouse and some lego.

May 2018

May 2018 was around the time I was introduced to arduinos and the world of microcontrollers. The robotics club at my high school had gotten some arduino learning and development kits, and being overly curious I took interest in learning about what I could make with it.

This was also the beginning of my programming journey, as all I had done before this was windows cmd and batch scripts.
I was also creating some interesting projects in my electronics class as well, such as a binary counter with 7 segment display output and a siren circuit.

June 2018

June of 2018 was a busy month for projects. This was near the end of the school term and I kept myself busy in the electronics course I was registered to. Going in no particular order, I worked on the following projects:
Being bored in my electronics class, I decided to be proactive and make something fun. I searched for a circuit online to bump up voltage and discovered how to make a boost converter. At this time, I had no knowledge of the math and calculations needed to make one of these work, but I managed to make one that was functional. I never took any operating point measurements, but from what I recall, the boost converter was capable of taking 9V in from a battery and bump it up to 80V.

Another project that stemmed from boredom was a lamp I made. I had an LED strip from an old light and wanted to make something fancy with it, so during my woodwork class, I made a nice lamp body out of maple hardwood and brought it to my electronics class. In class I soldered the LED strip to some wires and glued the LEDs into the wood lamp body. Using paper as a diffuser resulted in a nice looking desk lamp.

At home, I recently bought an Espressif ESP8266 wifi microcontrolelr to play around with. I experimented with connecting to APIs and making small webservers from the microcontroller.

For more fun with Arduinos, I experimented with servo motors and made a small two-axis servo pointer. The idea with this creation was to have it randomly move a laser to entertain my cat.

I was always in need of a power supply for my experiments at home, so I got my hands on some LM317 linear DC regulator ICs. With the help of some guides I found online, I built a 1.25V to 12V DC power supply.

Lastly for this month was my greatest achievement at the time. I was able to create a counter. sounds boring, I know, but it was quite a learning curve for me. This was the first complex circuit I had made at the time. Using a 555 timer, binary up-counter, binary to 7 segment decoder, and some discrete logic with diodes to create gates, I was able to create a counter that incremented from 00 to 99!

July 2018

This month I made a small altoids tin game controller. The idea sprung up when I learned that an Arduino Pro Micro can be used as a human interface device (HID) and send keyboard or mouse inputs to a computer. I wanted to try and make a small controller for the fun of it, and so I did.

Another experiment I did was making my Arduino output music through PWM.

August 2018

When I was experimenting with API connections and webpages using the ESP8266 wifi enabled microcontroller, I wanted to display information. This was done with a 2x16 character LCD screen connected to the microcontroller through I2C. At the time of creation, I didn't make the device do much, but later on in early 2019, I made the ESP8266 pull satellite information from the web and tell me when the international space station was overhead.

Another milestone I made was this two transistor FM transmitter. I didn't know much of anything about radios, impedances, antennas, or related topics, but I was extremely curious and wanted to try making this circuit. So after some failed attempts, I was able to create this FM transmitter. It had a decent audio quality over my dads truck FM reciever, but the oscillator was very suceptible to stray capacitance and would change frequency anytime I got close to the antenna or circuit board.

The schematic shown above was more of a reference as I implemented (to the best of my ability at the time) a buffer/amplification stage with another transistor after the first transistor. I cover another version I made of this transmitter in October 2018

September 2018

September wasn't very full of projects, but I did begin playing around with operational amplifiers. In this case, I was looking into how I could make a microphone for my computer so I can talk with friends over discord. Using an electret mic and an op amp that I really cant remember the part number of, I was able to make the worst quality microphone possible! It was quite entertaining as my friends kept saying my mic sounds like I'm at niagra falls or in a severe rainstorm. Noisy!

I also made some LED lighting for my monitors during this time. This was more solder practice than it was an experiment.

October 2018

During this month I gave the FM transmitter project another go, and made version 2! This transmitter worked a little more reliably, and after some reading I learned a little more about impedances and matching. Mind you I didn't know how to apply it let alone the circuit analysis required, but I still threw it in there as an experiment.

I also bought a small 7MHz (40m band) morse code reciever kit as I was getting interested in amateur radio around this time.

November 2018

November was a quiet month, the only experiment I have record of for this month was a Samsung S7 that I was able to gain root access to. This is a process known as Rooting, where you unlock the bootloader, flash a new bootloader, and then you have the ability to load any android operating system you'd like. In this case, I flashed an android OS called OxygenOS. I ran into issues right away however as the cameras did not function properly. This sort of issue made me choose to revert to the OEM samsung operating system.

December 2018

If you remember the laptop I had in a couple of the previous images on this page, it was reaching its end of life as it had a number of issues. I decided, instead of throwing it all away, why not salvage the screen! So I took out the screen from the laptop, bought a driver board for it (for cheap too, it was only $30 at the time), and mounted it to a sheet of acrylic.