Who am I

I am known as Henk Grobbelaar however, my real names are Hendrik Stephanus Grobbelaar.

Roots

I was born and still live in Pretoria, South Africa. As for the year, well… I would be counted among the 1st to be considered a millennial. It was actually a surprise to me when I heard about this.

I developed a stutter when I was around 5 years old, maybe before. This made life in school difficult, however, it also taught me many valuable life lessons which many people only learned much later in life.

Interests

I have always been interested in electronics, probably my father’s influence as he is an electronic engineer. In high school, when my parents bought me my first PCB that was to be exclusively mine, was when I discovered the awesome world of computer programming.

When I was 14 years old I wrote my first program in Turbo Pascal. I created a basic quiz program to help me study natural sciences. The idea was to optimize my time, learn to program while studying for a test at the same time. Looking back I just wanted to program more than I wanted to study, I did manage to do both though.

When I was 17 a friend introduced me to the C programming language and I borrowed his copy of “Learn C in 21 days”. I worked through the book and found that I was growing fond of the C programming language.

Education

After graduating from high school with qualifying grades to study engineering, I opted to study Computer Systems Engineering. In my mind this was the best program ever, to combine hardware with software.

During my studies, I would learn more about C and then C++ and finally assembler for both the microchip PIC microprocessors and also for the inter 386 instruction set. C++, to me, was the best thing since sliced bread. Assembler on a PC was incredibly valuable for me to learn how the hardware of a personal computer really works. There is something magical about going down to the hardware register level.

In the year when I would have started my degree, faculty moved to another campus that was significantly further to travel. I also already secured employment at the time and opted to stop my studies after earning my national diploma.

Work

I worked as a test technician in the electronic manufacturing sector for a few years after which I was promoted to a developer role. In this role I would mostly check buying lists however I also had the opportunity to develop control software for test equipment. This was my first exposure to VBA and then C#.

After a few years, I was again promoted to the junior draughtsman, here my responsibilities would be to design solder past mask stencils used in the electronic manufacturing process. I learned much about PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) during this time.

Another few years passed and my direct manager left the company for another job. I then took over his role and after performing well in the role for 6 months I was officially made the drawing office manager. In this role my knowledge about PCBs grew significantly, I was now tasked with writing reports and advising clients on PCB design decisions and how it might impact manufacturability, reliability, cost, etc.

Hobbies

When I was in high school and some time into my work career I would play paintball with friends a couple of times a month. Then airsoft became popular and I played a few airsoft games, however, an injury to my knees prevented me from continuing with this hobby.

In 2020 I became a bit fidgety. I was not learning enough to satisfy my curiosity. This was when I started to really get back into the home electronics DYI scene. My initial idea was to develop a complete weather station system and document the process throughout for anyone to follow and possibly learn.

I started with a raspberry pi and some sensors, then moved on to the PIC and then communicate between the raspberry pi and PIC using NRF24 devices. After I was not satisfied with the range of the NRF24 devices I moved on to LoRa modules.

Soon I discovered the ESP32 devices from Espressif. These were the most awesome little things I have ever laid my hands on. I fell in love with the devices, I became really passionate about them.

Website

I watched a Youtuber talk about a book that he read, Show Your Work! written by Austin Kleon. I read this book and it made sense to me.

I created this website in order to learn to write better, be more articulate in my ideas, and mostly to learn about myself.

I will be posting blog posts about events in life, my thought process on problems that I’ve faced or am facing now, or just my thought process around ideas.