Hey guys! I’m excited to join the folks at adafruit as a new writer for their blog. My name is Bill Porter and I’m an electrical engineer for the U.S. Navy. Can’t tell you much about my 9-5; basically I design and build robots. This is a picture of my latest project:

My main job is not why adafruit took an interest in me so I’m not going to go into any more details. What did catch their eye was my extra-curriculars and passion to get kids interested in science and engineering. My main program, the ‘Science Brothers’ has been covered by adafruit before. Right now it is just a road show that travels to local elementary schools free of charge to show off some cool science demos to their kids, but we are working on expanding it to include more. The program is half funded by NDEP (National Defense Education Program) and half volunteer. In fact, most of the demos are built in my living room. If you like you can watch a full length video of the program on it’s website. Besides schools, we also make regular appearances at our local science museum and on local news stations all to promote the program and STEM education.

Besides the Science Brothers and my ‘real job’ I also dabble in embedded electronics, arduino library writing and robot building at home, and most of my projects are documented on my own blog. I’ll be here posting items related to education and how we can bring the wonderful world of electronics from on-line to in-class.