General > General Technical Chat
Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
mawyatt:
--- Quote from: jonovid on June 21, 2021, 11:32:34 am ---in my opinion, the history of electronics is important from an educational point of view.
because electronics is so complicated and diverse, starting at the beginning and continuing to the present time.
is a good place to start. the skill is knowing what parts of electronics history are important for getting to the final conclusion.
--- End quote ---
Agree!! When I was an adjunct creating and teaching some grad school courses on RFIC design, I tried to convince folks at the university that a really good Electronics History course is not an option for a good well rounded EE student but a requirement, they didn't agree and no course |O
Best,
ataradov:
Again, you need to separate people for whom electronics is just a part of the hobby, not something they want to focus on. For students, I guess it is different, since they decided it is more than just a hobby.
I also would ignore any organized history courses. They tend to focus a lot on personalities, sometimes going to the cult-like extremes, especially if prof is a fanboy. And I don't care about the people behind stuff, they are irrelevant and the history is often distorted anyway.
But at the same time I agree 100% that learning about history of the field is extremely useful for modern designs. There is a lot of stuff Apollo-era electronics and computer design that still applies.
But I also would not start with it. It is useful to extend your knowledge and understand how the things you are working on fit into a bigger picture. If you are just learning and not working on anything, then there is no bigger picture yet. So the history should really be introduces as part of the actual course.
james_s:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on June 21, 2021, 03:20:12 pm ---
--- Quote from: jonovid on June 21, 2021, 11:32:34 am ---in my opinion Arduino is a trade mark. for do it yourself programmable computers on integrated circuits, before this we had
fixed single function integrated circuits as in the 555, before this transistor to transistor logic, vacuum tubes and telephone exchange technology.
history can get complicated if we try to add everything invented before we got here.
--- End quote ---
Don't forget, in the timeline between 555 and Arduino there was the PIC. Less up-front EE knowledge needed than the 555, but not as newbie-friendly as the Arduino. And I think it's all good.
By the way, CNC can be done easy and sleazy -- that's how I do it. I mill simple fixtures and panels, and do an adequate but hardly expert job. Before CNC I did shoddy work with a drill, saw, and file, so the only thing that's really changed is I have more tools available to be not-an-expert with.
--- End quote ---
There was the AVR before it got used in the Arduino, that was the first microcontroller I worked with. It was one of the first that had a BASIC compiler for it which made it easy to get started, and it could be programmed with very cheap hardware.
Regarding CNC, it sounds like you already had the machining skills, maybe not expert level but you knew the basics and were able to fabricate stuff. CNC has increased the precision and saved you the time of twirling the dials, but it didn't just magically make it easy to make the stuff, you still had to know what you were doing to some degree.
SiliconWizard:
I don't know whether "hobby electronics" has fewer or more adepts these days than it used to. I really don't know or have any relevant figures.
One thing I know: it's easier and much cheaper than ever to do it. Heck, we used to stick to a few books, magazines, parts from your local electronics store, and occasionally a few parts ordered, usually from order forms found in magazines. :) Cool and fun days. But still, these days you can find an gigantic amount of information for free within a few clicks. You can order cheap parts and get them within a couple days. Even a decent soldering iron would cost something back then.
Now it would be interesting to ponder to what extent this much easier access has made people in general lose interest. I think this is actually a well known effect.
We can also notice youngsters tend to shy away from technical activities these days. That can be seen in the studies they follow and jobs they take. But this trend may have little or nothing to do with the above.
As to Arduino having any impact on all this - probably none. But what I said above about electronics in general is all the more true for "embedded" development. Using microcontrollers back in the days was pretty expensive. I think the closest many of us have gotten to at the time was programming home computers in assembly. Possibly wiring some custom stuff to the expansion ports when we could find out enough info. That's what I've done at the time. The first real MCU I used was a PIC16F84. It was cheap enough and one could make a cheap programmer for it out of a few basic parts.
These days it's all very cheap. But whether it's impacting electronics as a hobby, in terms of the number of people practising it, I don't know. Probably so, because it's so much more accessible. But as I said, there are other factors as well making people lose interest, so overall, I don't know. But one thing for sure is that hobbyists have much more visibility too, mostly due to social networks and in particular, Youtube.
james_s:
The thing I remember most from my electronics hobby in the 80s-90s was how much harder it was to find parts. There wasn't much nearby besides Radio Shack and they almost never had all the parts I needed to build anything. I think DigiKey was around, but I didn't know about it and would have had to get my parents to call them up and order stuff.
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