Introduction

As a young teenager about 2 decades ago, I got started playing around with computers because I wanted to become a pilot. I was fascinated with flight simulator games at the time and wanted to play them. Back in the mid-90s, playing games like flight simulators still wasn't as plug and play as you'd like and I found myself trying to figure out how to build/repair computers in pursuit of making things work. The most I knew about computers at that time was whatever I observed going to friends' houses to watch them use their parents' or family's computer. Unfortunately, I didn't really know too many people with computers so I spent a lot of time going back and forth to the library trying to teach myself and this was before widespread Internet so resources weren't so easy to come by.

Ironically, and perhaps thankfully,  I spent more time learning about computers and programming than actually playing games. This led to a hobby that would truly fascinate me and stir my imagination that altered the direction of my life to a degree in Computer Engineering rather then Aeronautics and one that would lead to a successful career of now 18 straight years in technology. Nothing really "just worked" back then, at least not in the PC world, so I spent many hours of my life toiling away in front of a computer trying to make sense of it all. The engineer in me loved trying to figure out how and why things worked as I struggled to make this oversized calculator do what I wanted it to do. It became my passion and there is nothing better than earning a solid living from something you don't even consider work.

Over the years, my role in IT has evolved quite a bit as I moved from industry to industry. I have quite literally touched all aspects of IT work from building racks, running cables, to managing large enterprise environments, writing software, publishing two technical books and now doing lots of interesting things in "the cloud" for a financial tech company. What has been lost over time is a little bit of that fire and imagination that once burned brightly in that teenager who felt there was no end to the kinds of things we could bring to life with the help of computers.

Why am I mentioning all this history and why is it relevant to the Raspberry Pi and this blog? Well, I started reading more and more about this super cheap microcomputer designed primarily as an educational tool to encourage a new generation to learn more about computers. I saw it getting picked up by computer hobbyists and then used in all sorts of applications from DIY media centers, to robotics to large parallel miniature compute clusters. This "microcomputer" was the Raspberry Pi (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) and it awoke the curiosity and thirst for tinkering that I once had. With as much compute capacity of a computer about a decade ago in a package no bigger than my wallet, powered by nothing more than a 5V mini-USB port and drawing less than 1 Amp and with GPIO (general purpose I/O) pins that allows you input and output control signals for interfacing with low powered electronics, it's opens up all kinds of opportunities.

This blog is really just for me to document various things I'm trying with the Raspberry Pi as I begin to explore its capabilities. If it's helpful to others, great, but it's not really my primary objective. In many cases I'm going to just try to reproduce some things that others have already written about and maybe document my own experiences with the process, in other cases, I may try to piece together something different. At times I'll be working with existing software packages, other times I may try to code some stuff on my own. It might just be software, it might be a combination of software and hardware (a throwback to my Computer Engineer days playing around with robotics and AI). In most cases, I won't really have a big purpose other than to learn new things. Here goes nothing...

I'll be committing configuration files and code in this general purpose git repository : https://github.com/steguis/hapiprojects