From:	Grant Olson <olsongt@verizon.net>
To:
Date:	Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 2:50pm
Subject:	I love the nerdkit.

I just got my nerdkit yesterday and it's been a lot of fun so far.

I'm a software engineer by trade. I've messed around with everything from writing assemblers from sratch to programming in crazy languages like Ocaml, and all the normal boring stuff in between. Hey, I've got to pay the bills.

I've always been interested in getting down to the hardware level. I took a pilot "academic electronics" class in high school (way too long ago) that only had two students where we messed around with mostly analog stuff on one of those 100-in-1 radio shack kits.

I always wanted to mess around with a programmible microcontroller. Every once in a while I'd shop for a kit, either in magazines in the good old days, or searching the web these days. But all of the kits had the same problem: what the hell am I going to do with it after I solder it all together? They mostly had two LED number-displays, and that was it.

Your kit is different. Sure, a thermometer and a piezoelectric music maker aren't the craziest stuff, but at least they're practical applications that provided immediate feedback that gave me ideas of my own. And the wide LCD display really does make all the diffrence. After playing with the nerdkit, I'm wondering why I put microcontrollers off for all these years.

Initially, I was a little put off by the .pdf manual. I don't like to read stuff on the screen, and all those colored background bubbles made printing it out worthless. But after a few pages, I got over over it and worked out just fine. One minor comment: You ask a few questions in the manual along the lines of "Can you figure out why?" An answer key at the end would be nice.

Thanks,

Grant Olson

P.S. Its 76.23 degrees here in Pittsburgh right now.