8th Note blog - audio related DIY electronics

The beginning of my life with electronics, way before the 8th note brand

All this started many years ago. My interest in electronics goes back to my childhood. My dad used to do some small projects he saw in a magazine, including electronics. It was an early DIY magazine way before blogs and even internet turned up.

My interest in such things has began with some dead walkmans, LEDs, batteries and electronic model motors. I have made some clever things I can remember. I liked to tape a mechanical pencil lead to a model motors shaft, then powering it with a battery it started to turn and open a little bit. If it was ready, I gently pushed it to a drawing paper and start to draw things. If I did push it too hard the lead broke so I had to be careful. But it was fun.
Many years later I went to a school to learn more about electronics. Four years of study started from Ohms laws. Later we made an end-of-year project every semester. After school it could have been turned out well in this speciality but I wanted to try other things and my study of electronics ended.
Many years and an engineering degree later which has nothing to do with electronics I have got the itch again.
I am writing this blog about my experiments and projects I started since, and I hope it will be useful or at least interesting for other DIY enthusiasts like me.

Do you know how does it feel when You are 24 and know nothing about binary numbers? And then You want to know more? Nobody? Well, I had been thinking that by then. I was searching the internet for interesting projects and I realized something happened since the transistor radio we made once for an end of year project in electronics school. It was microcontrollers.

Microcontrollers being so popular and available, to be exact.

I forgot to tell I had been learning some computer programming back in basic school. But these days nobody use Pascal any more. So I bought an Atmel Attiny25 breadboard adapter, an USB programmer and opened a book called Embedded C in microcontrollers.

Anyway I learned C and I was ready to do my very first "led blinks in 1 sec interval" scientific project. Sounds interesting does it? This was only a beginning.
One of my first attempt to do something useful too was a car seat heating thermostat and an RGB colour changing lamp. 

When I felt that I was ready for more complex work, I think that was the time when I turned my interest to audio related DIY. I wanted to do something that involved external memory chips, 24bit ADC and digital controlled LED drivers. But I will introduce it later when I get there. What I was learning next and I want to tell about is how to turn an idea to something working (or partly working) on your desk.

At this point I want to clarify I will do no tutorials here, but one can definitely learn something from reading further. Sometimes I skip a learning curve or two here but I try not to make it difficult to follow.