Ever since I was in High School and took my first electronics course, I have wanted to build a robot. For some reason, robots have always facinated me, and I am a science fiction junkie. However, 30+ years ago the parts to build robots were not in easy reach of a high school student. For me they were just far to expensive to even consider actually trying to build a robot.

In my Senior year of High School, I was allowed to write an independent study course for myself. My instructor knew I was very interested in robotics and he was always very supportive in encouraging his students to pursue their interests. So, I wrote my proposal and submited it to him, which he approved. My goal was to start learning about sensors and how they are used to allow robots to examine and react to their environment.

Of course, at this time, there were not many sensors I could afford to experiment with, so I settled for what I and my instructor could scrounge up. I worked with photo cells mostly as they were plentiful and I didn't have to worry too much if I damaged some of them because we had a lot more.

Once I started working for a living, I had money I could spend on toys and projects, so I spent quite a bit to get a nice kit of standard TTL digital logic chips and assorted support components such as resistors, diodes, and capacitors. I did a lot of tinkering with digital logic.

I can't remember what happened, but I got away from tinkering with electronics until around 1984. I decide to get back into school then, and enrolled in a local technical school for a two year AS in Electronics Technology but only completed the first year (with high honors). The school got into bad trouble and was shut down - I heard it was due to too many students defaulting on their student loans. Another school was just opening up where I live and they took over the responsibility of having students complete their programs. However, there were other problems as some of the instructors seemed more interested in spreading their personal beliefs instead of teaching electronics. So, I lost interest and dropped out. This was in 1985.

I mostly just worked with personal computers until around 1996 when I got a temporary job with large software and hardware company. During this time I bought parts for and built five personal computers and connected them in a LAN and to the internet via an ISDN phone line. Just this year (2006) I finally decided I need to get some sort of project to keep myself busy. I became disabled in 2000 and have been living on disabily ever since, so money is not real plentiful. Still, I can manage to scrape up maybe $100.00 or on a very good month $200.00 to spend on things I enjoy.

Now (2007), the thing I enjoy is once again tinkering with electronics and I am actually starting to work on robotics projects. You will be able to follow my work in robotics and other pursuits here. I currently have two PCs, one runs Windows XP Pro and the other runs Gentoo Linux. I plan to make good use of the Linux PC (named quark) for my robotics projects. This is the year I go back into wireless networking again! One of my main goals is to have a robot connected to the interenet that can also use a remote PC that is more powerful to do complex calculations and processing.