Hi everybody
I've been a member of this forum for almost a year now, but I haven't done much posting. I am retired now after a varied career as electronics engineer and then a teacher and lecturer. My qualifications range across electrical and electronic engineering, physics, and environmental sciences.
I trained in the days of valve design (!!) and worked through the introduction of logic with CMOS and TTL, op amps and moving from germanium to silicon transistors. Left electronics in 1979 to retrain for teaching, mainly physics. My last job in electronics was part of a design team working on computer control for a range of CNC machinery. It was before IBM PCs and I remember with amusement my thoughts about our software engineers reverse engineering the operating system software of a Tandy TRS80. What on Earth is the use of a desk top personal computer? Just a toy. (!!!) Shows what little imagination I had!!
I had had some experience of computer design and machine coding, but it just didn't appeal to me at the time, so I continued with more traditional hardware. However, I could see the power available from microprocessors as embedded components but didn't get the time to develop that interest as I was spending most of my professional time designing power supplies, instrumentation conditioning, interfacing, and such.
For personal reasons I retrained as a secondary school teacher in the early 80's and apart from a five year sabbatical as a technician in an engineering department of a prestigious university, spent the remainder of my career as a physics, technology, biology secondary school teacher and electrical engineering FE lecturer.
I have had a lot of fun from all aspects of my careers but didn't know what hard work and stress was until I entered the UK's teaching profession. Suffering from the politicians climbing the greasy pole on the backs of teachers, it has not been a particularly easy job to do over the past 35 years. But I survived it and feel I made a decent contribution to our society through it. I am not surprised that one third of all newly qualified teachers in the UK leave the profession withing their first year. And we should all be concerned about that.
On my bucket list are to design and build my own guitar valve amp, get my box of Arduino and other micro proc bits doing something, and design and make a bunch of electronics projects that I have saved up over my career. The trouble is that while I procrastinate, others are producing the projects that I wanted to!
Just to add, I'm here to learn, to get up to date and to be enthused by the ideas of others.
Rock On All!
I've been a member of this forum for almost a year now, but I haven't done much posting. I am retired now after a varied career as electronics engineer and then a teacher and lecturer. My qualifications range across electrical and electronic engineering, physics, and environmental sciences.
I trained in the days of valve design (!!) and worked through the introduction of logic with CMOS and TTL, op amps and moving from germanium to silicon transistors. Left electronics in 1979 to retrain for teaching, mainly physics. My last job in electronics was part of a design team working on computer control for a range of CNC machinery. It was before IBM PCs and I remember with amusement my thoughts about our software engineers reverse engineering the operating system software of a Tandy TRS80. What on Earth is the use of a desk top personal computer? Just a toy. (!!!) Shows what little imagination I had!!
I had had some experience of computer design and machine coding, but it just didn't appeal to me at the time, so I continued with more traditional hardware. However, I could see the power available from microprocessors as embedded components but didn't get the time to develop that interest as I was spending most of my professional time designing power supplies, instrumentation conditioning, interfacing, and such.
For personal reasons I retrained as a secondary school teacher in the early 80's and apart from a five year sabbatical as a technician in an engineering department of a prestigious university, spent the remainder of my career as a physics, technology, biology secondary school teacher and electrical engineering FE lecturer.
I have had a lot of fun from all aspects of my careers but didn't know what hard work and stress was until I entered the UK's teaching profession. Suffering from the politicians climbing the greasy pole on the backs of teachers, it has not been a particularly easy job to do over the past 35 years. But I survived it and feel I made a decent contribution to our society through it. I am not surprised that one third of all newly qualified teachers in the UK leave the profession withing their first year. And we should all be concerned about that.
On my bucket list are to design and build my own guitar valve amp, get my box of Arduino and other micro proc bits doing something, and design and make a bunch of electronics projects that I have saved up over my career. The trouble is that while I procrastinate, others are producing the projects that I wanted to!
Just to add, I'm here to learn, to get up to date and to be enthused by the ideas of others.
Rock On All!
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