Getting Started

At this moment, I'm not even sure if I'm going to tell anyone about this blog. It's just something I'm doing to chronicle my adventures with a new piece of technology.

I spent about $100 to buy a Raspberry Pi with some extra components and a couple books. My long term goal is to combine some programming with some electronics and do something interesting. I don't know what that means. I'm just playing around with stuff to see where it takes me.

A little bit about my background:

• I consider myself a hack programmer. I have no formal training in computer science, but I've toyed around with enough stuff that I can usually figure things out eventually.
• I have a PhD in math. For the purposes of this project, this means very little. I didn't do anything in computer engineering (or engineering of any time) at any time in my academic career. My background may make it easier for me to pick up on some things, but that's probably about it.
• I am a college professor at a teaching college. This potentially gives me access to resources that I might not otherwise have. However, my school doesn't have a computer science program or any type of computer engineering courses, so there are no faculty that specialize in anything where I can draw from their expertise. Besides, that would take away from the experience.

Even though it was probably unnecessary, one of the books I bought was Raspberry Pi for Dummies. This book is probably a little bit beneath my level, but I wanted to make sure I had a solid foundation from the beginning, so that I wouldn't accidentally end up doing things the hard way. I'm planning to read the book through before even turning on the Raspberry Pi. This will probably only take me a day or two. So until I get through that, nothing interesting is going to happen.