You know,
those who know me will tell you I’m not prone to bragging and self-promoting,
yet for this thing here I’ll make myself an exception and throw this out here - for the only single reason that I’m hugely proud of myself. Those of you who’ve put together your very first pcb will probably know the same kind of excitement I’m going through - “will it work, did I design it right, did I solder the parts right”. I was talking about this with a IT-savy friend and the only way I could explain it so he’d appreciate it was in comparing it with his - and mine - early days of programming, when you’d poke register bits on your c64 in assembly and be amazed at the results immediately available to you. Such small steps, such thrill. Such as is the case now with this thing here (picture), a LED driver board based on the TI LM3404. Compared to what some of you guys are doing it’s nothing, well it’s a helluva thing for me 
I can see my first foray into electronics, corresponding with my entry into the world of netmf, was about a year ago. Given the very few hours I’ve spend studying and practicing - and they are much fewer that I’d like but my three year old takes up a heck of a lot of my time, probably for the best - it’s amazing to me to note how thanks to the gadgeteer initiative I would become proficient enough as to put something like the above together. It’s truly only because of the accessibility of the platform and by way of learning from this community (Justin that’s you in particular, your da man) I felt encouraged to do so, but, boy, do I not regret it.
What a rush - don’t know how I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
Anyways, here’s my thanks for being an active and dedicated community - for time and family reasons I’m not the greatest contributor, but I’m thinking in time my kid will get interested in this stuff (i’ll feed it to him) and that’ll open up more time for this stuff.
Now will go and harvest some gadgeteer sockets from a dead cerberus…
