I decided to “resurrect” my electronics skills, after two years that I ended high school. The reason it’s simple: I got an interesting possible job proposal, but I never worked with firmwares, so I wanted to start playing a bit with at least basics of them for practising while I still have some free time before the start of the next job.
So thanks to Mike Doty (KingTaco) I started looking at 8052.com and try to understand a bit more what I only had some partial knowledge of. I also started looking up the datasheets for the chips I do have here, and going to print the main ones (I like having hardcopy of what I need to work on).
I also started looking on how to build PCBs, thing that I never did before (my high school was of computer science, although I had a class of electronics for the basic knowledge, and although we never did PCB work there, I knew a few things, like the usage of Ferric Chloride. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I won’t be able to create PCBs at all, the main problem being that I don’t have a “safe” way to use the UV lamps that seems to be needed for applying the copper-protectors before incision.
I actually found an interesting page about creating such an UV lamp using an old broken scanner (page in Italian, sorry, but just look at the photos if you’re interested) but I’m afraid I don’t have a broken scanner right now 🙂
The main problem is that breadboards are limiting when building complex circuits and the boards with all the holes costs quite a lot more than the simpler boards for PCB creation 🙁
Whatever I’ll do, I’ll consider it an investment anyway, either for the job I’m going to take or for my personal experience, thing that is never useless. Now I just need to find a broken flatbed scanner… somebody has one? 😛