[sdiy] new guy - how did you start

[Michael E. Caloroso]

Electronics fascinated me from the beginning when I hung around my
father's HO scale model railroad layout.  This was no 8x4 ft plywood
base, this layout filled an ENTIRE ROOM.

I got good enough at it that I was able to do it myself.  My mother
loves to recall the story of a neighbor who stopped by looking for my
dad's help in wiring his model train set.  My dad wasn't around, so mom
sent me to help.  I got his set up and running and the neighbor was
quite happy, until it occurred to him that a five year old boy had just
shown a grown adult how to wire a train set...

That progressed to HO model racing cars.  I got good at hot-rodding them
not so that they would run faster, but so they would stay on the track
better without wiping out.  Speed wasn't the edge in winning, it was
staying in the race :)

When I was a frosh in high school, Guitar Player magazine published a
DIY preamp with tone control.  By then I was proficient with a soldering
iron and tools, and I built it for my bass guitar.  Then I built a few
more circuits out of Keyboard mag and EM.

I knew I was destined for EE in college.  I won a piano competition when
I was a senior in high school and used the scholarship money to fund a
PAiA 4700 synthesizer.  I built my own case and designed the internal
power distribution for it - it had a five octave keyboard and it was the
basic 2xVCO-VCF-VCA architecture with LFO and dual EGs.  I played clubs
on weekends to earned extra money and it survived gigging quite well.
Well, with one exception; the first club data with the PAiA didn't go
off well and I quickly learned the value of REGULATED POWER SUPPLIES :)

As my EE knowledge progressed through college I improved the PAiA.  MIDI
was in its infancy then but I held off buying $$$ toys until I was done
with college.  I designed and built a MIDI keyboard controller for my
senior project at college - got an "A".  By the time I graduated, the
great analog selloff of the 80s was in full swing and I got some great
bargains on great analog toys.  Most were Moog gear and in need of
repair or improvement, so I put in a lot of elbow grease.  I had also
applied knowledge from my reliability engineering job at work into the gear.

MC