I have been interested in electronics and especially in robotics since i was a little kid.I used to salvage electronic parts of toys and re-create different things with them. I used to make cranes with little motors and magnets.I always had a dream to make something fly some kind of a helicopter or a plane like thingy i remember when i was a kid , i was trying all kind of propellers and engines little ones , big ones.But i couldnt succeed.Nevertheless it has always been fun & entertaining to me to play with electronic things.
Later on i guess when i was 15-16 i started reading Make:Magazine and some other related hacker sites.It was fabulous to me to see people making homemade D.I.Y style electronic gadgets and everybody was sharing instructions & tutorials on how to build such stuff or even to get started in electronics.That’s when i heard about Arduino Dev.Boards. It was what i have been looking for , it was a great opportunity for a beginner.I have been in search of something like that like for 2 years those years i encountered NXT Mindstorms , PICAXEs but arduino seem like the best solution.
Actually i was thinking about whether buying and NXT Mindstorm of Starting to study PIC programming.PIC stuff looked so hard to learn to me those days and – the other option for me to start physical computing – NXT Mindstorm was really expensive i remember it was like 600$ or so here in Turkey.
So basically Arduino was a choice that combines Mindstorm’s modularity & PIC’s capability of physical computing and it was real cheap.
So i started electronics.