Joe Sugma

I have loved electronics for a long time, but I have loved disassembling things for an even longer time. Since elementary school, I've always been fascinated with how the items around me work, especially my toys. Unscrewing every screw and breaking every clip, no toy was safe from my grasp. I wanted to see how they worked because, at the time, everything seemed mysterious. At one point, I started taking apart electronics, starting with a remote-controlled robot. Some parts of the robot made sense to me, like the joints and motors, but other parts, like the remote and how the robot was controlled, were a mystery to me. This pushed me to learn more about electronics and how they functioned as a child, and is the origin of my fascination with them today.

A lesson I learned early on when taking apart electronics was safety, or at least I learned to actually look it up. Before, when I was taking apart mechanical toys, I was able to touch any and everything inside of the toy. But with electronics, there is a problem with the old approach: batteries. I first learned this lesson when I was taking apart an old camera. After I took the casing off, I grabbed the camera with a regular grip and bridged the battery. Luckily, the shock was pretty light, but at the time I thought I was going to die. Hours of browsing the internet about what happens when you get shocked by a battery ensued. On the bright side, I've taken steps to prevent another accident ever since, such as disconnecting any power source when opening a product.