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Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
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ataradov:
If you think CNC is easy, you clearly have never tried it. It is just different, but you need to figure out A LOT of stuff before it is just "press a button". And just like Arduino, CNC lets you make things that you could never have made with regular hand tools.

None of this means hobby is dead.

I get "old man yells at clouds" vibe from this thread.

Also, making PCBs at home was never fun or easy. It was a necessity, and as soon as ordering PCBs became an option, everyone switched to that. And now you also sit in front of the computer designing your perfect PCB, bummer.
james_s:
CNC is very hard. The machines do exactly what you instruct them to do, *exactly*, if you tell it to run the spindle full speed and then smash the tool into the table at max feedrate the machine will happily do that, once. This means you have to know all about manual machining and on top of that you have to know how to operate the CAD/CAM software, create the toolpaths, and set up the machine. It makes it easy to make a bunch of something once you have it dialed in, and it enables making things that are too complex to reasonably machine by hand but it does not make machining any easier. If you don't use the proper techniques you'll make a lot of scrap, break a lot of expensive cutters and potentially do some very expensive damage to the machines.
Dubbie:
Yeah, pretty much the only aspect that CNC removes from manual machining is the physical act of winding the handles.
The rest of a machinists skills are still necessary and a bunch more as well.

FriedMule:
I think you misunderstand me MCU, CNC and all programming can be very hard to do and it can be a true art with beauty!
Seeing a greatly designed board, well sought out components and beautiful soldering can also end up in being art.
These two thing is just not the same. I am not longing for the "good" old days, but I am fearing that discrete components may be going in the same way many THT components has gone because SMD is so much "easier" and takes up less space.

Since I know most about woodworking do I give that as an example, I think you have three main types of woodworking and none of them is better than the other, they are just different, but one do push the other away. You have:
1) Hand woodworking where no electricity are being used and everything is done by pure labor-skills.
2) Machine woodworking where electric tools are a big part of it and is helping one to reach results only few Hand woodworkers can ever reach.
3) Digital woodworker where only two tools is needed and everything is done by a CNC machine, all the skills lie in the programming on the computer.

You do almost never see hand woodworking anymore, this is a skill nearly nobody has the patience to learn.

Will MCU do the same to the hand-soldere?
ataradov:

--- Quote from: FriedMule on June 21, 2021, 12:27:10 am ---You do almost never see hand woodworking anymore, this is a skill nearly nobody has the patience to learn.

--- End quote ---
Yes, because it is a wste of the most precious resource - time. The only time you will do it if you explicitly interested in the process of hand wood working and consider it time well spent. And there will always be people that do that. The same way as there are still people using steam powered machines.

The goal of working with electronics for a lot of people is not the fact of working, but achieving the result they need for their actual hobby. Someone may make an Arduino controller automatic plant watering device. They don't care about electronics, they care about growing plants. Arduino is just a tool.

There a lot of people doing some hardcore electronics because they are explicitly interested in electronics, those people are not going away.


--- Quote from: FriedMule on June 21, 2021, 12:27:10 am ---Will MCU do the same to the hand-soldere?

--- End quote ---
You can hand solder MCUs, those things are orthogonal to each other.
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