Introduction

Two years ago, not long after the birth of my first child, I bought an Arduino with the aim of connecting a £20 IR controlled helicopter to my computer... and maybe hooking it up to a webcam so the computer could fly it using computer vision. From that rather random concept I spiralled into an addiction to Ebay, Hackaday and solder flux fumes.

Why?

I really wish I could answer that question.

Once I had the idea of hacking into this cheap, throw-away toy I started digging around on Google and discovered the Arduino platform. The original idea melted away with the realisation of what could I could do with one of these magic boards and a little bit of coding. I bought an Arduino starter kit, dredged my memories of electronics classes at school (coming up with 'V=IR' and not much else!) and started throwing together circuits on breadboards. They ranged from vaguely useful (like the camera flash trigger that could photo water splashing) to pointless bits of fun (the yet-undocumented colour mixer light that used an old PS2 mouse to control the amount or red, green and blue).



Now, there's not much I've built that hasn't been done many times over, but each project I take on is still exciting because of what I'm learning, making and the satisfaction of getting a system working.The aim of this blog is to attract people to this 'hobby' and to put something back into the community that has provided me with so much inspiration, ideas and volumes of C-code over the last few years.



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