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Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?

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SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: james_s on June 21, 2021, 07:54:03 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---

I was lucky to have an electronics store in my city which had a lot more than your typical Radio Shack. I would go there with a list of parts - pretty much looking like a BOM - and they usually had most of them.

As to books, many specialized books were pretty expensive too. So what I'd do sometimes is go to a library shop, spend some time in the Electronics section and read chapters in books without buying them.

ataradov:
My dad had all the components I could have ever wanted. Without that I doubt I would be doing electronics at all. There were definitely no component stores in 90s Russia, and only grownups could get the components though all sorts of sketchy ways.

I also found in backups my first ever MCU-based project. It was a replacement controller for the Sharp microwave oven and the file is dated March 2000. Here is the complete source code for some random 8051 MCU https://pastebin.com/raw/6Q2sHjwP :) Not too poorly written actually for what it is.

rstofer:

--- Quote from: george.b on June 20, 2021, 06:56:56 am ---
--- Quote from: ataradov on June 19, 2021, 09:52:08 pm ---My issue with Arduino is that sometimes people that only used Arduino assume they know how to do actual product development and apply for the real programming jobs. That never ends well.

--- End quote ---

Case in point: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/602bb22f8fa8f50388f9f000/Alauda_Airspeeder_Mk_II_UAS_reg_na_03-21.pdf

--- End quote ---

65 pages of wasting time!  Where in that tome is the reason for the 'Case in point'.

In any event, even real airplanes fall out of the sky when things go wrong.  The Boeing 737-MAX, a brand new design, has crashed a couple of times and they used real engineers and everything.

tooki:

--- Quote from: james_s on June 21, 2021, 07:54:03 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---
Digi-Key has been around since 1972 and Mouser since 1964. Newark was a shop opened in 1934, with their first catalog in 1948! But like you, as a kid in the 80s, I didn’t really know about any of them (nor McMaster-Carr.) I got my stuff from Radio Shack and the various cheaper ads in the back of Popular Electronics. I’m sure DK and Mouser advertised in that, but I had no way of realizing just how much more they carried than the other guys.

rstofer:

--- Quote from: ejeffrey on June 20, 2021, 05:04:20 pm ---
I would only give someone the 555 suggestion as an alternative to the Arduino, or if they specially wanted a more discrete solution, or if they had specific requirements such as size, parts cost, or something.

Arduino is far from perfect and I certainly groan when I see it in a "professional" product although if it does the job it can make sense.  But the complaining about people learning electronics through Arduino is just silly "old man yells at cloud" nonsense.

--- End quote ---

It probably turns out that an 8 pin uC uses fewer components than a 555 for any configuration.  We don't need the timing capacitor or the resistors for astable operation.  Adjustable frequency will still require a potentiometer and perhaps a second if we want to set pulse width.  The uC can generate symmetric waveforms, the 555 needs a lot of help to do the same.

I decide to design a new 'widget'.  I look around and decide that an ATmega328P would be a good choice for my project but I need a development board to get started on the code.  Oh, wait, I could do the preliminary work on an Arduino and just unplug the chip.  Half of my work is already done because libraries exist for just about everything.  Even if I don't use the Arduino libraries, I can rip the code from the source files and modify it to suit my needs.  I don't have to write everything from scratch.


I view the Arduino as a universal gadget, usable at many levels.


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