making stuff

Hi, I'm Sparky. As you probably gathered from the title of this blog, I'll hopefully be making stuff and posting the process and results. I'm notoriously bad at actually keeping up with blogs, so we'll see how this goes.

My profile says that I'm a mechanical engineer, though that doesn't really characterize the things in which I'm interested. I've always had a passion for computers and programming though I've never had any formal training in either. For that reason, I ask that you forgive me for any coding errors or obvious electronics mistakes. I'm reasonably fluent in Python, PHP, C++, and Perl. I hope to post any random scripts that I create so people can learn from them and use them as examples; most scripting will probably be in python as its easy to run and modify.

It also looks like I'm going to have to learn Processing so that I can use it with my arduino (pictured below) that I got for christmas. The arduino, for those not in the know, is essentialy an atmega168 microcontroller on a board that enables one to quickly and easily modify and run code to control the outside world. This is my first foray into what is commonly called physical computing, and I'm fairly excited.


My arduino duemilanove (2009 in italian)

I've got a few projects in mind for this little guy, the first of which will probably be a robot. Keep in mind that I've had practically no experience in electronics except for the two courses and one lab I took in undergraduate engineering so if you see any big problems, please leave a comment. In fact, you should probably leave comments just for the heck of it. Now, to only do something worthy of blogging about...