The beginning

Day 1

     Last night while cooking dinner I was listening to an old Triangulation podcast with Steve Gibson it was episode # 147 (If you're unfamiliar go here).  It was the second of a many part interview series and Steve's life has really struck a chord with me and has inspired me. I am planning on embarking on a journey to not only understand but also build a relay computer.  I have a lengthy background tooling around with various bits of tech and have an easy intuition for it but only in the past few years have I ventured into deeper learning and understanding of these things I love.  This blog may digress at times venturing into my PiDP8 kit build or various Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects but I promise to try and limit that exposure and when I do rant to try and keep it to the central theme of this particular project.  My goal is to work at least 30 - 60 minutes per day on this it will start as mostly research but will slowly morph into buying and building. I also intend to update this blog 3 times per week with a brief overview of what I have been up to most likely on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday every week. right now I am reading through a build here and trying to wrap my head around it I will be posting my thoughts and direction about this later today or more likely tomorrow.

     That all said I have a basic grasp of logic circuits and Boolean algebra so much of this will come quickly to me personally and I hope to any readers also if not google is your friend or I will always strive to keep up with comments. A further overview of my personal background and exposure is going to makeup the rest of this post so if that's not what interests you then move to the next post I promise this will be the only time I bother to get this personal.

     I am no writer and I doubt this will be a very compelling read to anyone outside of those looking to do the same as I am or tech geeks that love these things. But if you chose to read along I will try not to be to boring or dry and to also stay on topic and not pander.

     I am a 34 year old geek I played D&D I know my way around a comic shop and Linux.  I am most familiar with the Windows ecosystem but since starting to play with the Raspberry Pi platform have rekindled the romance with the command line and Linux specifically. I cut my computer teeth on an old IBM and the Apple II's my school had I grew up fiddling with 286, 386, and the brand new super fast 486 processors. I never delved to deeply into any 1 thing but knew enough to be dangerous with all of them.  I played Doom and Wolfenstein 3D like so many others and had a blast with my new windows 3.11 Hewlett-Packard machine in 1994 with the beast of a 486 in it and a CD-ROM drive. I spent hours playing a game called Mega Race which few enough people have heard of that I as yet cannot find a copy or port of to relive that particular childhood memory. I was just getting started with actually using that particular PC when the power supply died and I set it aside in favor of other endeavors. During high school I studied electronics and found my passion for hardware building a simple blinking light circuit or astable multivibrator with a 555 was just as fun my senior year as it was my freshmen year. After high school life happened and I was busy starting an adult life having kids working multiple jobs and generally struggling to find free time to occupy my interests, so it was not until at nearly 30 I managed to begin making time for my personal pursuits again. My youngest son has shown an interest in the electronic side of things and my middle son has shown an interest in machinery and these are desires I have done my best to nurture and grow these desires. Now I am at a place in my life where I can pursue my own interests with relative freedom and ease and I always have the guise of teaching them how it all works to do it.  Where I stand now tech wise is pretty straight forward I am on Android for mobile support with an unlimited data plan that I use extensively. I have 3 windows PC's 1 of which is a hand built i7-4790k powered gaming box/media server running windows 10 and 2 laptops of lesser note for school and work purposes. I also have 3-6 Raspberry Pi's in operation right now 1 running a connected calendar for the household the others in various states of use for everything from bitcoin mining management to a dev environment for my son's Arduino and scratch projects. I am slowly building up a home automation system based around Smartthings, Hue, and home brew particle photon projects. Other upcoming or in progress projects I am working on is a lighting system for my hedgehog that imitates the sun's rising and setting, multiple android and web apps, a robotic shift location verifier for my jeep to gain remote start, and a PiDP-8 kit that Steve Gibson mentioned last spring on the Security now podcast. These projects combined with this 1 take up most of my free time but come warmer weather I will be making time to partake of my preferred outdoor activities.  So building may be somewhat slowed.