One day my father took me to meet a cousin brother and seek his advice on how to accelerate my career and to get some help on final year industrial training.
I shared my interest in electronics and what all I was doing in my spare time to learn and also my frustration about how unhappy I was for how little I could achieve till day inspite of working so hard.
He gave me three very important pieces of advice:
- Be positive and happy for the small achievements. Prepare yourself for the right time, your day will come.
- Use Google to find information and learning, I wasn’t aware of it till that time.
- Also, he asked me to meet Naveen Kumar who was his engineering college batch-mate and now working as a training manager in TICO institute in Janakpuri, Delhi to seek help on getting training on microcontrollers.
I met Naveen and showed him some of my work and asked if I can get training at TICO. He agreed to help and started visiting TICO. I used to travel via bus and I remember it was the time before Delhi metro got constructed so it used to take ~2 hours one way to reach the institute.
I learned there the basics of microcontrollers and assembly language programming as C compilers were not that efficient and MCUs with >4K memory were very costly. I am talking about the time when MCUs were still coming with OTP memory and very few options were there with UV erasable EEPROM.
Initial, I found it difficult to learn assembly language and make logic but then I worked hard and slowly started creating logic and small programs in ASM. I rem making programs for interfaces like LEDs, seven seg display, switches, char LCD, EEPROM, etc. while learning programming and different interfaces of MCU.
This is how I got introduced to Google and MCUs for the first time in my life 🙂
NEXT (my work at various companies I joined after completing my engineering)