New and even more exciting challenges await me...

I'm embarking on yet another adventure. This one is travelling to the world of electronics. It's a land that isn't totally foreign to me for I have had a keen interest in it even going back to my young Skeeter days.

I guess my first exposure was when my oldest brother, Dave, an Electrical Engineer himself, had all sorts of equipment that lit up his bedroom.  He had everything from oscilloscopes to ham radios including something my friend, "The Jer" and I referred as his "shock machine".

I may have written about it previously but it was simply a device that had two orange juice cans that we would hold in each hand that were wired to a transformer and Dave would entice us to hold on for as long as we could as he slowly increased the voltage. "The Jer" always could hold on the longest, either because he was braver, or had a higher pain threshold. Regardless, I always had an interest in all of the electronic gadgets.

Fast forward to some 60 years later and here I am refreshing my brain with all of the different Laws of Electronics including Ohm's Law, Coulomb's Law, DC Circuit Laws and many more. And why, you might ask?. Well, because I just love to learn things and as the world is on a fast-paced race to automating everything we do and particularly doing it with a Smart Phone, I want to be on the forefront.

I've joked before that if people could wipe their butt with a Smart Phone, they'd probably do it. And, quite frankly I love the ideas that shoot in and out of my head-brain as I think of new ways to automate everything around me.

I mean, how cool is it as you get to work, or on vacation or anywhere and you ask yourself, "Did I shut the garage door?" Well, now all I have to do is turn on my WiFi camera from my phone and if I see the garage door is still open, a simple app closes it.

But I'm taking it even further. I'm not buying these finished products. I'm building them from scratch. Well, that is along with Dave's help.

In my pool business more and more customers are wanting to automate their equipment, having things like their spas turned on and heated by the time they get home or having their waterfalls dance to lights and music. Sure, that equipment has been out there for a few years. But it was all a propitiatory mystery. Now, I can build it myself for just a mere fraction of the shelf cost.

But why, why do I want to go to the trouble of building it rather than buying it. It's because I want to use my brain. I don't want to sit and simply get old. I have writing that stimulates me but now I have a new world of electronics that stimulate me, sorta like that shock machine that I used to hold onto when I was a kid.

If anyone has a suggestion or an idea of something they need, let me know.I can make it for you.

My first project has been simply making a blinking light and turning it on and off from anywhere in the world. Simple?  Yes. But if you can make a light blink, you can do anything.