Welcome to Tinkering At Night . My name is Felipe, I'm from Mexico and I'm an embedded software developer. This blogs serves as a repository for the notes in the projects I work on, but also as a guide in many of the topics I'm really interested in. But before I start writing my first tutorial, I would like to explain the reasons of why I'm taking the time to write this blog and what motivates me.
A little bit of my past
Since I was a teenager I was interested in engineering, specifically in microcontrollers. I was curious on how to program them and my first approach was learning assembly language for the microcontroller PIC16F84A, Arduino wasn't sell in my country at that time. As soon as I manage to run my first program on the PIC, my curiosity for learning more about these device started to growth. I recall that I lockdown my self for an entire summer to learn from different forums on how to build different projects around the PIC and read the many articles hackaday.com posted each week. Anyway, the sum of those experiences led me to study Mechatronics Engineering back in 2011.
Why I'm writing this blog
I have always admired the people which has the time to write about their projects they are working on and are willing to share their knowledge. My interest for embedded systems and engineering projects arises from reading many blogs and websites related to diy projects.
Although I've been inspired by these people, unfortunately I didn't have, in my opinion, the knowledge but most important the complete desire and commitment to write this blog. Even though I have designed and programmed it since 2016, I hadn't made up my mind to publish it until now.
Now that I have the time, but most important the enthusiasm for this blog, I'll try my best to write well explained tutorials or projects, describing each step and the tools I have used. My wish is that you learn something from each post that I write, therefore you can develop your own projects, and who knows maybe start writing your own blog.
The scope of this blog
I consider my self as a maker which means I'm interested in all kinds of projects. However, although I'll work with different technologies and manufacturing processes, I'll not go through the already well known path which many blogs follow. What I'm trying to say is that don't expect a tutorial of blinking leds using Arduino. Don't get me wrong, Arduino is an excellent tool for people who are starting in engineering or in making something. I had wished I had this platform before I studied engineering.
I came up with this different approach when I turned a year in my job. I realized that as topics related to embedded systems become more complex and challenging there is less information, I guess because there's few people with the knowledge or with the time to dedicate a few hours to write about it in a blog.
My goal with this blog is to guide you through other topics which are less common or where the information about those is scarce. For me, the purpose is to show you the next building bricks after the blinking led, which usually is more complex and more challenging.
Last thoughts
This post summarizes pretty much my intentions with this blog. I expect you enjoy each post that I publish and learn something in the way. Sorry for my english, I'll try to improve my writing skill since it's not my strongest one, even in spanish I struggle.
Warning about this blog: I don't have many knowledge in web programming, so as I continue publishing posts also I'll be working on improving the design and functioning of this site, therefore expect a lot of changes or failures, at least until I set up the whole site. Thanks for your comprehension.