My personal interest in electronics started when I left my previous job back in 2017 and my colleagues offered me a Raspberry Pi. I had already been working in IT Operations for over 14 years, but I had never really heard of or played with a Raspberry Pi. That’s really what kicked off my interest in electronics, robotics and later retrocomputing.
So I started playing with the Pi, and I got mostly interested in the GPIO header and the possibility to plug sensors and actuators and interact with them. I then quickly discovered another type of boards (and microcontrollers) like the Arduino, Nodemcu, Wemos and robotics stuff. For example, I built a 4 wheels robot equiped with a Huskylens AI camera, able to do object following autonomously.
In the same year, my brother showed me a very fun little game, Human Resource Machine (HRM) in which the player is innocently driven into coding in a drag and drop fashion to control a worker in a factory environment. Looking back at the game, I then understood how the whole game is about low level coding of a processor in assembly and managing register, ram and I/O. Around the same time a colleague introduced me to FPGAs. I acquired a Lattice ice40hx1k Icezum Alhambra development board and learned Verilog hardware description language, enough to design my own CPU, inspired by HRM, that was capable of running the same levels of the HRM game, with the same language), plus some extensions of my own invention.
Later, inspired by Ben Eater’s series on the 6502, I started building my own 6502 breadboard computer. The same year, I was hearing some chatter about FORTH, and I got curious. I discovered it was an old programing language, from the late 60’s, based on post-fix notation. Being a big fan of HP RPN notation, I looked into it and got immediately drawn to it. And rather than simply learning it, I learned some FORTH by implementing my own FORTH kernel in 6502 assembly (and FORTH) for my own 6502 computer.
I have also developed a recent interest for vintage calculators. The first item of my collection being my own HP 48sx, I have now been able to add some more to the collection.