What's All This Then?

The plethora of very low cost, highly integrated digital, analogue and mixed signal semiconductor circuits has resulted in a revolution in hobbyist endeavours as well as a flood of low cost, high performance, professionally designed contraptions.  I have watched, over my thirty years in electronics engineering, enormous changes and advances in technology take place and a concurrent and dramatic rise in complexity and accessibility and fall in cost.

I have no desire to write detailed posts on the design or construction of electronic gizmos and will completely avoid the tedium of specifications and compliance requirements.  There is already far too much of that in my professional life.  The aim, here, is to tinker and talk about this from time to time.  Hopefully I can avoid letting out too much of the magic smoke that makes modern electronic gadgets work but, hey, that is sometimes just par for the course.

Although we sometimes think that we have mastered the electron, it is an illusion.  The domesticated electron is still a wily character and nobody can really be certain of its whereabouts at any time, as quantum physics has revealed.  However, we can coax it into doing a few things for us now and then but it does take a grand effort on our behalf to domesticate the electron on even the most basic level.