Bodging is what i love to do most. During the day i am a mechatronic engineer/programmer for an automotive R&D company.

I love to bodge with most things, including high voltage stuff, robotics, ai and machining.

Skills that i can share include cnc programming, programming in c/c#/vb/php/sql, basic cad, electronics, PICs processors - particularly 16bit (pic24/dspic33), lathe/milling, foundry work, sand casting, vacuum forming, injection moulding and basic lockpicking.

I love to chat about my projects and show them off, and i love to learn about other peoples projects, and help out where i can.

Take it apart... Make it better... Then add lasers.

My thoughts about arduino. Well i bought an arduino from Justin last week to teach my wife about microcontrollers, and had a little play with it too. It was simple to setup, easy to program and we had our first project up and running in minutes, so thats the upside. The only downside i could see was that it was slow, but thats a relative term, it still runs at 16 mhz so its still going some, just not as fast as the 60mhz up micros that i use normally, but still more than useful for most microcontroller tasks.

I am NOT impressed with the IDE at all, everyone told me it was easy to use etc. etc. but i think notepad would do just as well. When i gets a real ide i will be much happier.

It seems that perhaps just too much abstraction happens with the library system, i tried a pwm colour fading led with a ds18b20 and found that the read was enough to upset the led fade, but i feel that could have been fixed by poking about the registers.

For me it feel like a bit of a toy, a really cool toy, but still a toy

For my wife its a wonderful introduction to microcontrollers and coding, and lets her build some led and servo based projects for the house.