Happy Birthday

Hello everyone

Well it has been twelve months since my very first post – banging on about replacing the battery in my cordless telephones. The last year has certainly zoomed by very quickly, and with it has seen 135 original posts about all sorts of things. Funnily enough, I had never planned on creating a “blog” at the time… instead a few books of notes were being used to record my thoughts and ideas.

It all started while looking for an electronic kit to build… I thought it would be great to have a website where you could read about others’ experiences in building the kit – in order to decide whether or not you would like to build it yourself. Whilst waiting for the kit to arrive some other ideas evolved into posts, mundane things such as replacing calculator batteries, sourcing cheap electronics books, and the start of a power supply saga.

After writing about the JYE Capacitor meter kit, Madeleine and Marcus from Little Bird Electronics asked me to write about this Arduino thingy that they had, and sent one over to play with. Thanks guys! Things picked up a bit after that – now hundreds of thousands of people regularly visit my Arduino tutorials for fun, guidance, and to rip them apart (the tutorials, not the Arduino). And along the way I have had loads of fun writing about more kits, reviewing various parts and items, sharing my projects with the world and learning the basics.

One of the best things that has resulted from this blog is the opportunity to come into contact with some very interesting and inspirational people such as Jon Oxer from Freetronics, Andy Gelme, Dave Jones, Tim Carr from Mindkits, and many others too numerous to mention. Furthermore, it has been great conversing with the many members of the tronixstuff Google Group, answering the thousands of random email questions (well, answering most of them has been great), interacting with my twitter followers, and giving away things with the regular competitions. Speaking of which:

Finally, a lot of the content in this blog would not be possible without the generosity of various people and organisations. So a huge thank you to Little Bird Electronics, Freetronics, element-14, RS Designspark, Alan Parekh, Ogi Lumen and Gabotronics. And especially to those who were kind enough to make a donation.

The year ahead shall see a few (or more?) more Arduino tutorials, the start of another series concerning a different type of microcontroller, more interesting and inane projects, more reviews, and possibly a book. So stay tuned, and thanks for coming along for the ride.

In the meanwhile, be good to each other and make something