Jim Lowe , sheffield, United Kingdom

I have had a true passion and interest for technical subjects from an early age. These subjects evolved my inquisitiveness for electronics in particular and I recall I was always taking apart various toys from my childhood much to my parent’s “annoyance” as I just wanted to learn how they worked and not so much play with them. I learned a great deal about how electrical toys were manufactured and connected together in these early inquisitive years. From the age of 9 I began my true engineering journey by learning to read circuit diagrams from electronics books in the library and popular electronics magazines of the 1970’s such as Practical Electronics, ETI, and Elektor. Reading these lead me to start assembling electronic circuits. My entire career has been in the Electrical / Electronic engineering industry at various levels and capacities; I gained technical qualifications along the way from individual BTEC unit's studies at night school to Bachelor’s Degree level and further gained the professional qualification of Chartered Engineer through the IET. I have many years of electronic fault diagnostic experience learned from my many mistakes when building circuits and from practical experience of being a repair technician. Later I became more involved professionally with embedded systems based on popular microcontrollers using both assembler and ‘C’ programming language to program them. In general, I am a hand's on practical person and find that I can turn my hand to most things involving manual working. When renovating my home as an example I have done most of the work myself as I enjoy doing the work to my level of quality. I have very high standards and quite fussy about the finer details of the any work so often I find it is better to do it myself. As a hobby in the past I enjoyed renovating cars which involved removing and replacing engines, finding faults on engines and repairing them. I have a technical workshop that is well stocked with lots of equipment collected over the years; these include oscilloscopes, various meters and bench power supplies to the more general DIY tools used around the home. This is where I spend some of my spare time to gain further knowledge on various technical subjects and trying out experimental ideas that might one day form the basis of that “New Invention” or product. I am a regular viewer of EEVBLOG :- http://*******.** by Dave Jones, he fills any gaps in my knowledge.