Can you tell u a bit about you?
My name is Van den Bossche Eric (Erisan500 on the forum). I live at Puurs in Belgium (between Sint-Niklaas and Mechelen). I have 4 kids, 1 girl and 3 boys. I recently started working for a company that does Industrial Automation.
How did you get started with hardware?
It all started when I was working as IT Manager for an Italian paint company. I wanted something cheap (yeah, budgets were tight as everywhere) to monitor temperature and humidity in my server room. So we bought a bunch of OneWire sensors and used an Open source package called DigiTemp. Here my interest in interfacing hardware with a pc was born, and wanted to do similar stuff at home and here’s where I started with (like many others) an Arduino. But I soon realized I needed something that was more flexible, powerful, and more easily to program. So I started searching google. Soon enough I stumbled upon TinyCLR, and boy, it was love at first sight. Because I was unemployed at that moment, spending money for a hobby project was out of the question. After talking with Gus, they donated me some gear (I will always be thankful for that, it changed my life a bit) .
What was your first GHI product? and projects and products you used after?
The first product I had were the boards GHI donated me, a Cobra and a Panda. In the first weeks, I was just fooling around, but the cobra became the base of a Domotica system I had in mind. Controlling lights and measuring electricity, water and gas consumption was not only fun and exciting, but it pushed me to do more. It didn’t take long before I could dial a number on my voip phones to open the garage door. (that allowed the kids to open the garage with their Android phones when we were not at home). After that I got another 2 Panda’s, 2 B/W 3.6" LCD screens, a Rhino, 2x16 LCD, XBee adapter, and a CANXtra as a gift.
Have you designed hardware yourself?
Not yet, but I’m about to. I want to create cheap wireless nodes to place around the house and monitor the temperature (and humidity, motion, …) in every room.
You mentioned you just landed a new job. Can you tell us more about it?
After being unemployed for a while I started a C# Developer course. I was able to develop in C#, but to find a job in that direction without a degree is pretty hard, so thats why I followed the course. At the end of the course, my instructor proposed me a job that was all about automation, but they develop in Delphi, so I was a bit skeptical, after all, I studied C# for about a year, and it felt like I wasted a year. But they insisted and we arranged an interview. I took the liberty to bring with me some GHI boards to the interview, and when we reached the Domotica section in my CV, I threw them on the table. The guy was sold, I got the job.
Any words, advice or comments for the community?
The GHI community is the most awesome community I have ever been part of. No matter what your skill-set is, everyone is always helpful and friendly. Especially those couple bots 
My advice, keep it up. I know I haven’t been very active the last couple months due to studies, a new job and moving places, but be sure " I’ll be back " 
Where can we find you on the web?
Nowhere yet …
As soon as I’m settled in my new house, I’ll put some time and effort in starting a blog about my process with the .Net controlled Domotica projects.