Having a background in software engineering, it was a logical fit to take a look at electronics. After ordering some cheap parts and experimenting with LED's, light-sensitive sensors, IMU's and gps-modules it was time to put it together and see what could be achieved. The experiments got more advanced and the moment you start protocols (I2C) you are quickly lost if you can't verify what is being sent. To be able to debug signals on the hardware-side you need a descent oscilloscope, so a rigol ds1054z became part of my hardware-side tools.

Quadcopter

After seeing some tutorials on quadcopters - most notable the ones by Joop Brokking - I put and together a list of parts and ordered them. Then started analyzing the existing sourcecode and do my own experiments to get a feel for receiving signals from the RF-transmitter, sending a signal to the speedcontroller in order to get the engines to turn.

Piano-tiles

My daughter was crazy about piano-tiles. This is a game in which "piano keys" scroll down the screen with an ever-increasing speed, and you have to tap them. For fun, we decided to automate this together, so we made a project-plan, looked at required components and started thinking through how this could work. The easy part was detecting when a black tile was scrolling by (with a light-sensor). The harder part was to generate a click on the screen. After some experiments with a relays and some copper coins, we got "clicks" working and wrote the software for the piano-tiles project. It's really fun to see the game being played, and the clicks of the relays sound really satisfying. 

L12s Wireless Communication

Another small project was to have some wireless communication. For experimentation, the breadboard contains two separate stm32's + l12s chip. The documentation of that chip is quite poor, so it took some experimentation but in the prototype the 2 stm's are sending messages to each other.

STM-F407 and touchscreen

Scaling up the processor this is an STM32 F407. Initially I experimented with hardware timers, and after that decided to try and get some content on the screen and get it to react to touches. The touchscreen parts was again quite challenging due to poor documentation, and basically little to no samplecode being available. I did manage it in the end though.