When I was a kid, I enjoyed doing different electronics projects. Now that I am nearing retirement, it's time to pick up new hobbies or restart old ones. This seemed like a natural choice since this was something that I enjoyed a lot back in the day.
Back then, the typical way to do a project (at least for me) was to find a a ready made kit, or at least schematics that someone else had desinged and simply implement it. Even that was a usually a lot of work, since it typically involved making my own PCBs with different types of not so healthy chemicals.
But I quickly discovered, that thats's not how its done today. Today you design the PCB with some sort of CAD software on your computer and then order it professionally made from China. That sounds like a lot more pleasent way of doing this !
So now I needed to figure out how to start all this. I had already thought a lot about what kind of projects I would undertake. I did know that I was interested in doing things with a microcontroller, so I started studying different options. For different reasons I finally decided that I would start with a Raspberry Pi Pico and Micropython, as that seemed like a well supported way of getting started.
So first I needed to figure out how to write Micropython. Having never done anything really with Python, that seemed like a good way to start. I chose Thonny as my development environment.
Next step was to choose how to design the circuits around the Pico. After some evaluation I decided that KiCAD would be the right choice for me (for no other particular reason than it being free to use) so I started to learn that.
Now the only thing left to do after all this, was to decide what my first project would be, more on that on the next article.
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