It all started before personal computing with a Sinclair Scientific Calculator kit. My father had bought Sinclair’s earlier calculator, the Cambridge. However, after a couple of hours with a soldering iron I had a calculator that would actually give an error if you tried to get the square root of a negative number.

I went on to build a Sinclair ZX80 from a kit and then a ZX81. After than electronics and computing devices became black boxes to buy. Now some 30 years later I’ve got the bug for tinkering with electronics again.

I’m Mike Dodds, a web developer with Open Text. I live in quiet village in Scotland, not far from Edinburgh. This blog will be about my trials and tribulations playing with open source and open hardware.