2019 Blog Intro

I have had a few blogs throughout the years. They usually do not last and/or are not maintained. They fall victim to my dwindling inspiration. This year however I promise to commit myself to this blog and its readers no matter how few. I believe the lack of content will be mitigated by the fact that this blog will be mostly about micro-controller programming and projects relating to electronics. This vast area of interest will produce no shortage of content.

What you will find here is an array of tutorials concerning microcontroller programming at the register level using C. The flavor of choice used here is the popular STM32 brand. This blog will also contain knowledge about specific electronic engineering topics, such as but not limited to power electronics, robotics, and anything else that sparks my interest. You will not find basic electricity tutorials like explanation of Ohm's law, there exist a plethora of great websites tackling those topics. What I will cover will  closely resemble upper division college course topics. Furthermore I have a personal section of the blog where I simply document my experiences in school / work / life or just express my opinions on tech etc.

At the time of this writing I am an electronic engineering student in south Florida. I am fairly interested in embedded systems and power electronics. I did not have the opportunity to go to college right after high school because life had other plans for me. During the time in between high school graduation and finally starting college at age 25 I had numerous interests and jobs. I briefly day-traded e-mini futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ( like trading stocks but you need less money to actually make money). I worked at a restaurant as a busser. I worked installing granite kitchen tops. I worked many more odd jobs. At some point I was on instructables.com and I stumbled on a "word clock" project that required the use of an Arduino. I quickly fell in love with the Arduino and with electronics in general. Even as a kid I loved programming but now my programs were controlling physical things. I have always been curious, infinitely curios and I cannot stand not knowing how something i'm interested in works. Calling the Arduino function and not knowing what they really do bothered me. Burning Arduino boards and blowing up transistors and not knowing why this was happening also bothered me. The opportunity for college presented itself and I ran towards it at full speed with no doubt in my mind what I wanted to study. I quickly abandoned the Arduino platform because I knew if I wanted to become a real engineer I needed to learn the hardware and how to really program microcontrollers, no employer is going to accept an Arduino library in thier product, not to mention there are hundreds if not thousands of different microcontrollers out there. I jumped on the ARM Cortex wagon and specifically the STM32 to learn how to program microcontrollers. Once you master one vendor it is easy to program any other chip because you realize at the end of the day it is nothing more than just registers and bits being shifted in and out.

I am also very interested in power electronics. For some reason programming microcontrollers feels so easy and I dont feel like a real engineer. Power electronics however challenges me at every step of the way and I appreciate that very much. 

Oh I also played around with photography... I will make a post showing some of my work.