Interview with Alex Iannuzzi

Featured Engineer

Alex Iannuzzi

Alex Iannuzzi - Owner/Hobbyist - insideGadgets

How did you get into electronics/engineering and when did you start?

It all started back when I was in high school, my uncle introduced me to electronics. I started with the Dick Smith Funway series and then moved into kits that required soldering. I thought about getting into basic stamp but never really did and after a while I moved from electronics to programming/scripting.

Only last year [2010] did I pick up electronics again, this time I started off with the Arduino which has given me the kick start I needed to want to explore electronics again.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

It would be the Arduino and the Scanalogic analyser. The Arduino allows me to easily prototype anything I want to do quickly and since more and more people are using them there is a lot of information, tutorials and examples available.

The logic analyser is such a nifty piece of hardware to use, if you ever want to see the raw data communicated between components or the current state of a component it’s the tool to use.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I use Circuit Simulator which is a very simple program to simulate circuits on, whilst it might not be advanced as SPICE, I find quick and easy to use. EagleCAD for the schematic/PCB design.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

When I was working on my Gameboy cartridge reader I would be able to read the RAM from a certain cartridge once but then when re-reading it, it would give me bad data. The fix that worked after lots of testing was to read something from the ROM before reading from the RAM.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

When I think a project is finished and it’s ready to go, I take a day off and then come back to review the project. I’m likely to find something that needs to be changed.

What have been your favorite projects?

GBCartRead – a Gameboy cartridge reader has been one of my favorite projects; it’s something I thought I wouldn’t be able to do. After reading lots of documentation and starting to do things one step at a time you start to understand how it all works. Once it’s all finished you realise that it wasn’t too hard after all.

Another of my favorite projects is the Standalone Temperature Logger which I documented my progress each step of the way. It was a good learning experience in which I moved into the ATtiny series, made my own “2 wire” communication protocol between it and the Arduino, moved away from the Arduino software and then used V-USB to allow data transfer to a PC directly.

What direction do you see yourself heading in the next few years?

I’d like to continue to make projects that interest me, tearing things apart and making tutorials.

Why do you have an interest in electronics?

I feel it’s because once you have a basic understanding of the building blocks you have the ability to build anything you like; all you need is an idea and your time. I also like to look at what other people are doing which makes me more enthusiastic to build my very own projects.

What would you say to others who might be interested in electronics?

I would tell them to jump in to it straight away, it’s very rewarding seeing the results plus you don’t need a whole lot to get started. All you need is an Arduino starter kit and you’re good to go. Play around with the examples that come with the Arduino software and you’re bound to want to create modifications to those examples which will lead you into making your own projects.