About me

My name is Lars Ole Pontoppidan. I have a Master of Science in Electronic Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, specialized in embedded programming. My C.V..

My technical history

I have always had a pronounced interest in technical matters. As a kid I teared everything I could get away with apart, to see what the internals looked like. I gathered electrical parts and connected them at random, only to discover that nothing happened. That gradually changed as I grew up and learned more about electronics.

The personal computer has always been a major interest to me. The first english words I ever knew were LOAD RUN LIST IF THEN etc. because my older brothers taught me how to program the C64. I followed this up on IBM PC compatibles and created all sorts of obscure programs and games. Initially I used Basic interpreters, but in the desire to get better performance and more control I learned C (using DJGPP) and did some nice MCGA graphics, accelerated with inline assembler.

Microcontrollers

At some point during my university education I stumbled upon microcontrollers. This was a true eyeopener to me, as microcontrollers in essence combines my electronics and programming interests. They are also tremendous tools to master, as programming and deploying a microcontroller allows talking to other digital ICs and interfacing digital devices. With microcontrollers you can suddenly create useful stuff with your soldering iron.

Thanks to the stimulating environment and the talented guys at the university, I quickly upped my hardware development skills, and have to this day created a bunch of electronics projects, most of them employing Atmel AVR microcontrollers. Some projects took one day to complete, others were/are pending for years.

Lars' Electric Endeavors

This website is intended to be a showcase for my most interesting projects and to open source them, as a way to pay back all the help I have gotten from other open source projects.

Last update March, 2010