Research Topic: Hobby Electronics

I think that I have decided that I can write a decent amount on the subject of hobby electronics. There aren't many other blogs dedicated to this, so I can kind of fill a niche so to speak. There are, however, plenty of sites with ideas and circuits for the amateur electronics enthusiast. One good example is a nice collection of projects and the like that a man named David Merrill has collected on his site. In addition to writing about projects that other people have done, I can also post some pictures and schematics of different projects that I have done myself which can help to add some content and get some of my ideas out for other people to critique and possibly suggest improvements for. I could also consider using this as a way for other people to submit their projects and circuits to get them on the 'net. Maybe.

Another idea would be to expand from just electronics into robotics somewhat to feature some of the more interesting things going on in that realm. I would still like to keep to just the hobby side of things instead of going into the industrial or commercial applications, except maybe for really cool stuff. This would allow for some more variety in posts and discussions and could help to draw a wider audience. Also - electronics and robotics tie together quite nicely in that for any piece of equipment in a robotics project to be truly functional it needs some pretty interesting electronics to go with it.

Along with these, another possible way for this to expand (this might be getting out of hand, but this is just some free-thought going on here) would be to tie all of the above into my major and feature some of the more interesting and useful software that can be written for electronics to control the robotics. Hat trick! Hmm... I'll have to ponder on this for a while and see what I can come up with, without the whole thing getting completely out of hand and being very difficult to manage. I might also have to start simple this semester, and then maybe build on this after I've got a good foundation going during this semester.