This section is about electronics with a heavy emphasis on embedded microcontroller projects using the AVR series of chips.

What's an embedded system? Well in general the term refers to small electronic "gadgets" that are controlled by a microcontroller. Technically they are computers but you don't normally recognise them as such. Your microwave oven is probably a good example, all those buttons and displays are controlled by a microcontroller computing away in the background, there's no Windows and no mouse but it's a computer none the less.

Some history

Although I worked in photography during most of the 70s I always had an interest in electronics and used to build my own stereos from kits etc. In 1978 however I became really interested and a year or so later managed to get myself a job in the field. My main interest was in digital circuitry (mostly 4000-series CMOS) but I also designed various analogue projects.

Microprocessors were not a part of the landscape at that time and I distinctly remember getting a data sheet from Intel featuring the new 4004 4-bit microprocessor and thinking "What a crock, there's nothing useful you can do with these things".

Of course I was about as wrong as you can be, these days there's a micro in just about everything.

In spite of my initial misgivings within a couple of years I was right into microcontrollers/processors, mostly the 6502, 6805, 6809, 80x86, Z8, Z80, Z180 and Z8000 chips but also 2900-series bit-slice processors. I even won an Institute of Engineers design award for a remote bore level monitoring system featuring a 6502-based solar-powered remote unit and a Z80-based base computer (the RF work was done by Marshall Shepard, an analogue engineer workmate at the time and now friend who still doesn't see any point in microprocessors :-)

I was employed as an electronics engineer for most of the 80s and on the side worked freelance as a PCB designer and even had a product on the market for a few years, an EPROM emulator which had some commercial success and earned me the title of ACT Inventer of the Year.

With a change of job I moved more into high-level software engineering although I still had an electronics lab at home until 2001 when as you may know we hit the road and all forms of hardware/firmware development went by the board.

Fast forward to 2007

A friend of mine (Gavin from hobohome.com) was building neat gadgets with Picaxe processors and one day, when talking about his projects, my interest was rekindled. However I was building Wothahellizat Mk2 at the time and didn't have the time to do much about it so electronics was put on the back burner.

2009

Gavin makes a comment on his web site something like "the wind generator's output is not regulated so I knocked up a simple regulator with a Picaxe". This comment gets me thinking about electronics again and before I know it I've justified the purchase of quite a pile of electronics gear and components.

So here we are then with a new section at robgray.com, one dedicated to electronics in general but more specifically to microcontroller-based projects that are useful around the motorhome.