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Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
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Brumby:
"Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?"

No.  It is saving it.

The key point to remember is that the hobby - LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD - is changing.  Today's society is used to better communications, better health, better engineering, better just-about-anything than previous generations.  Higher quality, lower price, improved functionality, greater choice ... and many other aspects of the utility of the things around us.  As a result, our expectations are much higher and attaining that "WOW" factor that fired up young imaginations is now at a much higher level.

Our joy came from achieving something that was not found in the everyday.  We CREATED something to do our bidding.  That desire and reward hasn't changed, only the platform on which it is built .... it's a lot higher these days.

It is very much a matter of "standing on the shoulders of giants".  Today's younger geeks can see greater possibilities than we did in our day, only because those that went before have built upon the work of those before them.  Here is where we see the earlier developments become commonplace and what we consider unremarkable today would have blown our socks off in our school days.  I still remember sending off a bank cheque payable at the Chemical Bank New York, New York for some 7400 series ICs at prices that made it worth the wait for snail mail to the USA and back.  One of the projects I made with them - and a piece of Veroboard - was a digital clock.  Did I not do electronics because I used ICs instead of discrete transistors?

Let the Arduino crowd do their thing.  They are involved with (one facet of) hobby electronics.  It is an entirely valid corner of the electronics playground and quite appropriate for the characteristic direction of development across a broad spectrum of disciplines: specialisation.

As a final point, I would ask this....  If YOU were able to get your hands on something like an Arduino when YOU first started out in electronics, wouldn't YOU have jumped at the chance?  (Aside from the fact that most of us wouldn't have had something to run the Arduino IDE on  ::) )
RoGeorge:
- Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
- Is the other way around.  Electronic hobby is killing Arduino.  With every day.  Countless Arduino are misused, abused and killed in electronic hobby.  It's a massacre out there, a true Arduino genocide, I tell you!  ;D
james_s:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 23, 2021, 02:51:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: george.b on June 20, 2021, 06:56:56 am ---Case in point: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/602bb22f8fa8f50388f9f000/Alauda_Airspeeder_Mk_II_UAS_reg_na_03-21.pdf
--- End quote ---
Ah yes: a "dead man's switch" implementation which requires a separate person to go check the pilot, and if still struggling, put him out of his misery with a switch.

Their "kill switch" was literally a LoRaWAN module that in theory should be able to energize a relay to cut off power to the rest of the device.  The incident occurred, because this "kill switch" could not contact the drone to "kill" it.

That sort of stupidity is not characteristic of the Arduino environment; it is characteristic of humans who believe their stuff is more valuable and therefore always to be prioritized over any risk to others.

(Edited to clarify:  The only reason you'd wire a kill switch to require a working connection to kill a device instead of having the connection keep the device alive and kill it whenever the connection was lost, is because you believe an accidental killing of the device would be a bigger loss than anything a completely uncontrolled device could cause.  And since the device at hand was a flying death trap of over 90kg of metal, plastic, and glass fibre, including several high energy Li battery packs easily capable of causing a fire individually, the "designer" was an idiot who apparently felt that killing someone else would have been preferable over losing the device itself.  They should be prosecuted, and never allowed to "engineer" anything more complicated than a ditch in the ground ever again.  May sound hyperbolic, but when a person shows they are willing to risk the lives of others to reduce the risk to their own property, they need to be evaluated and judged by the same criteria they applied to others, or they'll never change their behaviour.)

--- End quote ---

In this case it's not quite that simple, with an aircraft that large and heavy that is totally incapable of gliding will fall out of the sky like a rock if the kill switch is activated, an accidental activation of the kill switch very well might result in injury or death just as a failure to activate it. The real problem (among many others) is the idiotic failsafe behavior that causes it to keep flying if signal is lost. The hard kill should be a very last resort, prior to that if the signal is lost the craft should attempt a controlled landing. This is not hard to do, even $40 toy quadcopters these days have an auto-land feature. Rather than plummet out of the sky and smash into whatever happens to be below it, the craft should attempt to get as close to the ground as possible before shutting off. Really it should have multiple redundant onboard GPS receivers and try to return to the location it took off from. If the GPS position it sees is further from the takeoff location than would reasonably be possible for the craft to have reached (suggesting GPS malfunction) the craft should enter a panic mode and attempt a soft landing wherever it happens to be.
RoGeorge:

--- Quote from: mawyatt on June 21, 2021, 04:58:31 pm ---
--- 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

--- End quote ---

Electronic History would have been a great theme for an EE class.  Maybe some youtube classes, or a book instead.

The EE history idea reminded me about the first chapter from "Planar Microwave Engineering" by Thomas Lee.  It's a condensed history of EE and a very entertaining read.  Everybody "brush and floss after every meal, and visit your dentist regularly", because outch, it hertz what happened to Hertz!   :o

That chapter is free to download as a sample from the book:
https://assets.cambridge.org/052183/5267/sample/0521835267ws.pdf
https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/planar-microwave-engineering/CA50D727AD97C3F4789065F1F9DB0771#overview
langwadt:

--- Quote from: james_s on June 23, 2021, 06:16:03 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 23, 2021, 02:51:13 pm ---
--- Quote from: george.b on June 20, 2021, 06:56:56 am ---Case in point: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/602bb22f8fa8f50388f9f000/Alauda_Airspeeder_Mk_II_UAS_reg_na_03-21.pdf
--- End quote ---
Ah yes: a "dead man's switch" implementation which requires a separate person to go check the pilot, and if still struggling, put him out of his misery with a switch.

Their "kill switch" was literally a LoRaWAN module that in theory should be able to energize a relay to cut off power to the rest of the device.  The incident occurred, because this "kill switch" could not contact the drone to "kill" it.

That sort of stupidity is not characteristic of the Arduino environment; it is characteristic of humans who believe their stuff is more valuable and therefore always to be prioritized over any risk to others.

(Edited to clarify:  The only reason you'd wire a kill switch to require a working connection to kill a device instead of having the connection keep the device alive and kill it whenever the connection was lost, is because you believe an accidental killing of the device would be a bigger loss than anything a completely uncontrolled device could cause.  And since the device at hand was a flying death trap of over 90kg of metal, plastic, and glass fibre, including several high energy Li battery packs easily capable of causing a fire individually, the "designer" was an idiot who apparently felt that killing someone else would have been preferable over losing the device itself.  They should be prosecuted, and never allowed to "engineer" anything more complicated than a ditch in the ground ever again.  May sound hyperbolic, but when a person shows they are willing to risk the lives of others to reduce the risk to their own property, they need to be evaluated and judged by the same criteria they applied to others, or they'll never change their behaviour.)

--- End quote ---

In this case it's not quite that simple, with an aircraft that large and heavy that is totally incapable of gliding will fall out of the sky like a rock if the kill switch is activated, an accidental activation of the kill switch very well might result in injury or death just as a failure to activate it. The real problem (among many others) is the idiotic failsafe behavior that causes it to keep flying if signal is lost. The hard kill should be a very last resort, prior to that if the signal is lost the craft should attempt a controlled landing. This is not hard to do, even $40 toy quadcopters these days have an auto-land feature. Rather than plummet out of the sky and smash into whatever happens to be below it, the craft should attempt to get as close to the ground as possible before shutting off. Really it should have multiple redundant onboard GPS receivers and try to return to the location it took off from. If the GPS position it sees is further from the takeoff location than would reasonably be possible for the craft to have reached (suggesting GPS malfunction) the craft should enter a panic mode and attempt a soft landing wherever it happens to be.

--- End quote ---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort :)
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