Author Topic: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?  (Read 20827 times)

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Offline Siwastaja

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #75 on: June 26, 2021, 06:36:12 am »
Still, I must point out that in my view/terminology, reducing safety target that low because of fiscal resource constraints, is still malice.

Oh, I do agree with this. But I also see the actual Arduino hobbyist, who's now suddenly in a "real company" and called an "engineer", who came up with the technical details of the kill switch, isn't the one who decided to reduce the safety. Likely they were carefully mentally manipulated to accept this while not even understanding what's happening.

Add unnecessary stress to blur the vision and make the "engineers" do panic decisions so that the demo next day can run. Make them feel they are somehow saving the world by participating in this project, maybe this drone solves the climate change and saves millions of human lives. And, make them believe the project fails if they can't provide a demo the next day. This sounds stupid when put like this but a real sociopath is well capable of manipulating great majority of people, even those who are far from being gullible.

Even outright lying is possible. This is just speculation based on what I have seen in similar situations, but I wouldn't be any surprised to hear the engineer had doubts about the safety but the higher-up promised and guaranteed that this demonstration will be arranged physically somewhere where spectators are all protected or far enough and there is no controlled airfield nearby. Such promises are always off the record and made in private to be outright denied later.

That kill switch thing is really hard to do properly. It should have features like an autonomous drone but then it becomes a whole different level of task, namely designing the autonomous flying system to fly safe.

If I absolutely had to do this without involving the rabbit hole of full autonomous flying, my list of priorities would be,
1) Do everything I can to make that communication link reliable so I can invert back to the usual logic (no signal -> cut power)
2) Do some stupidly simple (analog?) logic that indeed cuts power, but with a super-reliable delay of say 5 seconds. During that wait, in the main flight microcontroller, run a semi-stupidly simple rescue logic which is unlikely to fail, supposed to provide maybe uncontrolled but still smoother landing; for example, keep the IMU-controlled leveling enabled (feeding back the ratios between motor settings) while rolling down the general "throttle" (or average power to all motors) setting during that 5 seconds;

but I do realize this isn't enough for proper safety level, either. It might be two orders of magnitude better than what they had, but still not enough. For a good solution, I would like to have a good team, time and money, and limited stress level so my brain is allowed to work.
« Last Edit: June 26, 2021, 06:44:34 am by Siwastaja »
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #76 on: June 26, 2021, 07:53:49 am »
Even the hobby quadcopters already have a simple safety system that works pretty well. If they lose radio signal, which happens occasionally for various reasons, they don't just cut the throttle to zero, they reduce it to a level that causes the craft to descend while maintaining control so the craft stays level and doesn't just fall out of the sky. A kill switch that completely kills the motors would be idiotic, at least using one that did that while the thing was at significant altitude would be. A full kill switch could be useful for ensuring the motors are shut off once it's on or near the ground or near people.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #77 on: June 26, 2021, 01:07:08 pm »
A kill switch that completely kills the motors would be idiotic
Having only that sort of a kill switch, yeah.

But we've pretty much established already that what a drone should do in exceptional situations is complicated, and isn't really the point here; it is understandable if that was the problem in this case. But it isn't.

The point is that that this design chooses to deliberately ignore things like loss of communication, and instead relies on an external signal as the trigger or detector for exceptional situations.

I've thought about this some more, and reading the other arguments here, I think my attribution to malice is indeed incorrect, and negligence is a better match.
Similar to say a driver causing an accident because they were busy playing with their phone while driving.
There, too, I would not blame the phone (or Arduino) for the accident; those were just something that got used while the user was being negligent.
 

Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #78 on: June 26, 2021, 04:49:16 pm »
A kill switch that completely kills the motors would be idiotic
Having only that sort of a kill switch, yeah.

But we've pretty much established already that what a drone should do in exceptional situations is complicated, and isn't really the point here; it is understandable if that was the problem in this case. But it isn't.

The point is that that this design chooses to deliberately ignore things like loss of communication, and instead relies on an external signal as the trigger or detector for exceptional situations.

I've thought about this some more, and reading the other arguments here, I think my attribution to malice is indeed incorrect, and negligence is a better match.
Similar to say a driver causing an accident because they were busy playing with their phone while driving.
There, too, I would not blame the phone (or Arduino) for the accident; those were just something that got used while the user was being negligent.
I'd say ignorance, more than negligence. The designer lacked experience and didn't envisage such a dangerous situation occurring. Similar to a child finding something dangerous like a car battery dumped in the street, playing with it and starting a fire.
 
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Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #79 on: June 26, 2021, 08:03:13 pm »
The designer lacked experience and didn't envisage such a dangerous situation occurring.
They were fully capable adults, so lack of understanding is not and should not be a protection against culpability.

Let's say you design a hand-held widget with a 2000 mAh lithium-ion battery in it.  But because you're not experienced in such design, yours has this metal spike that will pierce the battery and short it, if the device is held "incorrectly" in adult human hands.

Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those?
While you did not cause them to happen, your negligence made them possible/likely, and in most legal jurisdictions you would be culpable.
I believe you should be culpable, because you were negligent in the design of the hand-held widget.  Same for the drone case.
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #80 on: June 26, 2021, 08:19:29 pm »
Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those?

Try asking that to a software developer.   ;D

Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #81 on: June 26, 2021, 09:32:28 pm »
The designer lacked experience and didn't envisage such a dangerous situation occurring.
They were fully capable adults, so lack of understanding is not and should not be a protection against culpability.

Let's say you design a hand-held widget with a 2000 mAh lithium-ion battery in it.  But because you're not experienced in such design, yours has this metal spike that will pierce the battery and short it, if the device is held "incorrectly" in adult human hands.

Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those?
While you did not cause them to happen, your negligence made them possible/likely, and in most legal jurisdictions you would be culpable.
I believe you should be culpable, because you were negligent in the design of the hand-held widget.  Same for the drone case.
Looking at how crappy the design was, it's a bit of a stretch to say they they were fully capable adults.

I'm not saying they are not culpable, just that there's a difference between negligence and ignorance, due to perhaps incompetence. The blame might lie further up the chain, than the designers. The person who employed them should have done due diligence, to ensure they got people who were suitably qualified for the task. If you want something designed on the cheap, so go and hire a load of college students, with no engineering qualifications, or experience and it blows up and kills someone: is it fair to blame the students? Aren't you more to blame for hiring people who weren't up to the job?
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #82 on: June 26, 2021, 10:05:57 pm »
Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those?
Try asking that to a software developer.   ;D
Being one myself, my answer is yes.

I do firmly believe software engineers should be responsible for design errors.  Stuff like having an "undocumented" root shell with a fixed password listening for incoming connections on a nonstandard port, and believing it is safe and okay to do that as long as it stays a secret, should get you fired and blacklisted, just like structural engineers who pass sub-par concrete jobs because having it redone is just too much work.

Yet, have you ever heard of a software engineer getting punished for doing bad, dangerous work, like for implementing software that silently garbles user data?  I haven't, and it annoys me.  I am sure it is one of the reasons why average software quality is so atrocious.

If you want something designed on the cheap, so go and hire a load of college students, with no engineering qualifications, or experience and it blows up and kills someone: is it fair to blame the students? Aren't you more to blame for hiring people who weren't up to the job?
Assuming the students are adults, they are partly to blame.  Those hiring them are also partly to blame.  I'd need to see their communications to have any quantitative opinion (i.e. who more, who less).

Also note that I am of the opinion that if an underage person commits crime, both they and their legal guardian should be punished.  This extends to companies and organizations, too: no power without responsibility.

I do know that this is a scary opinion to have, because most software developers are used to being able to cop out of responsibility (via licenses and disclaimers), and the thought of being actually responsible for ones own work output is scary.  I know, because it scares me too.  So I understand why people oppose this opinion.  But I think that fear is good and necessary: The same reason I want structural engineers to be responsible for their work product, is the same reason why I think software engineers should be too, and if one cannot handle it, they should get a different career with lesser personal risk.
 

Offline Siwastaja

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #83 on: June 27, 2021, 07:11:34 am »
But software is* different because it's in total crisis, have been for maybe two-three decades now, in any case so long that most software developers who are notoriously young people have never seen a simple and working software system in their life. Maybe in 1970's software development paradigms were not any better but problems were limited by the software size and complexity limitations coming from the hardware and languages available.

*) describing the situation as it is now, not what I would want it to be; in my opinion, software should be evaluated against the same standards as hardware, buildings, bridges, and so on, depending on where it is used.

Now, no one seems to have an idea how to build even remotely robust software, no one seems to have an idea how to build any software for less than say $100 million, especially if taxpayer is involved. No one even dares to discuss about responsibilities. There's a lot of software science telling us how to develop robust software but all of this is failing in practice.

Software simply doesn't need to work at all, no one bats an eye. For example here in the Great Finland we have this new healthcare IT system which reportedly by doctors prevents proper care completely, nearly or actually killing people left and right (for example, by completely blocking the availability of any patient information, including allergies to medicines, in emergency situations in ICU), but no one can do anything, and no one is and will be held responsible. It was so expensive it has to be used despite how many human lives it takes. So we can't even say "hey, let's free everybody from responsibility and just drop this software, revert back to the old working system, and forget about this ever happened"; no, we have to continue making human sacrifices on the altar of modern software paradigms.

Hardware on the other hand, not so much. The situation is so much better we can afford to have this discussion about responsibilities, remove the few bad apples. Besides, no one buys hardware that is completely non-functional but for some strange reason, with software this doesn't seem to matter; I can't think of anything else but it's because people are so desperate with software, anything at all goes.

And yes, I again agree with mr. Animal that starting holding software developers responsible for the worst offends (like killing people directly or indirectly) would help solve the software crisis. The task is enormous but it has to start somewhere. On the technical side I applaud mr. Animal's efforts regarding C standard library improvements/replacements to get rid of all the built-in traps in current specifications and implementations.
« Last Edit: June 27, 2021, 07:19:40 am by Siwastaja »
 
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Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #84 on: June 27, 2021, 10:39:46 am »
Well there's safety critical software., which does have to work and not kill anyone. I put a lot of the blame on those who commission the services of software companies. A government organisation, such as the UK's national health service, should write penalty clauses into the contract, with software companies, stating that they're responsible for damages if it goes wrong.
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #85 on: June 27, 2021, 11:24:05 am »
Well there's safety critical software., which does have to work and not kill anyone. I put a lot of the blame on those who commission the services of software companies. A government organisation, such as the UK's national health service, should write penalty clauses into the contract, with software companies, stating that they're responsible for damages if it goes wrong.

I don't disagree but the premiums for "Errors and Omissions Insurance" are going to be staggering.  In fact, the premiums are likely greater than the base contract.

Imagine how much money Internet based companies would have to pay if they were held accountable for all the hacks that reveal customer's identity and credit card info.  But I agree, they should be held accountable.

More so for life safety failings, of course!
 

Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #86 on: June 27, 2021, 11:36:23 am »
Back to Arduino...

In another thread on the Beginners Forum, I showed an Analog Discover 2 project displaying the rise and fall curves of an RC circuit.  The AD2 is very expensive so I wanted a cheaper solution.

The 555 comes to mind, it's a great solution as long as the circuit will produce 50% duty cycle.  Still, there's a lot of messing around wiring everything up on a breadboard.  Some form of external power is required.

Enter the Arduino Nano.  It took exactly 1 line of code to create a symmetric square wave source of very nearly exactly 80 Hz.  The statement:  "tone(2,80)" in the setup() function.  All of the boilerplate setup() and loop() functions are provided by the IDE.  Yes, one line of code and I had my square wave.

I plugged the Nano into the breadboard, plugged the resistor between pin 2 and one leg of the capacitor and the other leg went to ground.  I used the USB programming cable to provide power.
 Pretty quick!

I didn't want elegance, I wanted a square wave.  The Nano is a pretty slick solution for less than $5 and the device is serially reusable.  The cost can be spread over a number of breadboard projects.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/what-an-oscilloscope-recommended-for-a-woman-passionate-about-electronics/msg3594603/#msg3594603

Reply #906 has the final image for the charge/discharge waveform
« Last Edit: June 27, 2021, 11:40:23 am by rstofer »
 
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Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #87 on: June 27, 2021, 01:21:50 pm »
Back to Arduino... [...] It took exactly 1 line of code to create a symmetric square wave source of very nearly exactly 80 Hz.
And do consider what this means for anyone starting electronics as a hobby.

I think it is very similar to how in the 1980s my friends and I painstakingly copied Basic code off computer magazines, saved to cheap and slow cassette tapes, and were elated after several hours of work to see a funny little game or program producing visible results: we did that with our own effort.

It is true that some never advance from that stage; that alone is/was fun enough.

More important is how that kind of experience shaped those that did decide to dig deeper, designing their own code from scratch –– the first I designed were mazes and a jump-over-the-obstacle stuff.  A few decades later, I am no longer limited by my skill, only by my own imagination and effort required.  That sort of power of creation is intoxicating.

Instead of evaluating Arduino based on how many stay at that stage, we should evaluate the effect of Arduino on electronics as a hobby and as a profession based on those who do advance from Arduino to "truer" electronics.

After all, thing not happening could be due to any number of reasons, so it is more sane to focus on those that did happen; and compare those two categories qualitatively, not quantitatively: why, not how many.

I would bet real money that most structural and mechanical engineers played with Lego Technics, Meccano, or similar toys as children, for example.

(I do worry about chemistry and similar, since things like chemistry sets are considered Dangerous And Not For Kids anymore.  To say nothing of climbing in trees and playing with your friends without direct continuous adult supervision, and what that means wrt. attitude towards physical exercise and personal responsibilities later in life.)
« Last Edit: June 27, 2021, 01:24:52 pm by Nominal Animal »
 
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Online DiTBho

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #88 on: June 27, 2021, 02:39:47 pm »
- 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

LOL & RIP  :D
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Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #89 on: June 27, 2021, 03:08:53 pm »
Instead of evaluating Arduino based on how many stay at that stage, we should evaluate the effect of Arduino on electronics as a hobby and as a profession based on those who do advance from Arduino to "truer" electronics.

After all, thing not happening could be due to any number of reasons, so it is more sane to focus on those that did happen; and compare those two categories qualitatively, not quantitatively: why, not how many.

I have been writing code since 1970 and playing with uCs since I bought the Altair 8800 in '75.  It wasn't much of a system at the start with just 256 bytes of RAM but it wasn't long before systems were fully populated with 64k.  A 4k memory board cost $400.

Given that background, I have never given much thought to the Arduino.  I just pick one up off the bench and do something with it.  They've been around here for a long time, I probably have more than a dozen of various flavors.

As a result of this thread, I'm beginning to suspect that the Arduino is the most important device in modern electronics and it is aimed right at the beginners.  The range of potential projects is enormous.  Variations on the theme include WiFi and networking.  There are larger AVR devices and the IDE, for better or worse, supports even more capable devices like the Teensy 4.1 which is a blazing fast uC.

OK, I concede that using the Arduino is likely to be more code than wire but that's just the nature of modern electronics.  The good news is that libraries provide most of the code and you can create a useful project with just a single line of user code.

And, yes, the Raspberry Pi is right up there on the importance scale as well.  Who would have thought that Linux could run on such a small board?  It gets better!

I always wanted a PDP-11/70 and now I have two!  They are the PiDP11 boxes that use a Pi to emulate the PDP-11 and even in emulation, they are faster than the original.  Playing with Fortran, Pascal and Assembly Language for the PDP-11 is fun!  Running a full version of Unix means all the tools are there along with networking.  Very slick!  OK, there's no GUI but there isn't supposed to be.  The world ran on Telnet and FTP back in the day.

https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11
« Last Edit: June 27, 2021, 03:10:44 pm by rstofer »
 
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Offline madires

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #90 on: June 27, 2021, 03:57:04 pm »
And, yes, the Raspberry Pi is right up there on the importance scale as well.  Who would have thought that Linux could run on such a small board?  It gets better!

RasPi is luxury. Ever tried linux m68k?
 
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Offline rstofer

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #91 on: June 27, 2021, 04:38:38 pm »
And, yes, the Raspberry Pi is right up there on the importance scale as well.  Who would have thought that Linux could run on such a small board?  It gets better!

RasPi is luxury. Ever tried linux m68k?

No but I have a lot of experience with UCSD Pascal on a Z80.  Primitive, by comparison, but I really like Pascal.
 

Offline PrecisionAnalytic

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #92 on: June 27, 2021, 05:27:59 pm »
To me is an Arduino a finished product you write some code too, while electronic is the assembling of discrete components.

Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? What do you think? :-)

I don't know. Would have to review all the data (of the population... mewhahaha.... yeah right) and do some stats on to make a more determinate assessment. 

From my perspective, they remind me of a simple dev board where one can prototype MCU electronic designs with and then use only the minimum components required for the project ultimately as well as design your own PCB around those components.

To me, seems there might be other issues killing everything they can, like watching TV for entertainment (or anything entertainment industry that isn't practical survival related including luxury survival reqs.) that is fanatical or fantastical and not the arduino or anything much math, science, engineering or logical tech oriented.   Animals, placating on the Pan Troglodyte genes in the unaware and unknowing to the more advanced domesticated maintaining growing populations society humans acts, events, skills, tools, etc., are more the reason.

« Last Edit: June 28, 2021, 09:37:26 pm by PrecisionAnalytic »
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #93 on: June 27, 2021, 05:47:00 pm »
As an arduino-level hobbyist when it comes to actual electronics (as opposed to embedded software development), the hobby possibilities that opened for me when I found out about JLCPCB and EasyEDA, is like a complete new world opening up for me.

As a physicist, I did some electronics courses ages ago.  As a kid, I built my first kit (LED roulette!) at age ten or twelve or so at school.  I've fixed a CRT TV in the nineties by replacing its soldered-in channel selector backup battery, whose voltage I had to determine based on the ICs, and got some flak from the electronics store clerk for being a "TV repairman now, eh?" when I asked if they had data on the chips I could determine were related to that circuit.

But this, having microcontrollers and the ability to manufacture dual-sided boards without getting into chemistry (ferrichloride stains, anyone?) on a budget more on par with bubblegum than shoestrings, now that opened up a complete new world of possibilities and fun.

Suddenly, for me at least, electronics shifted from fixing things and finding out how stuff works, into creating new stuff.  Even though I had enjoyed the basic courses and had the basic theoretical knowledge, I never *needed* any of that to create something new; circuit design was simply too expensive (for anything I considered worth designing).  Now I enjoy doing that for fun, and that's because of Arduino, and cheap prototype services and parts resellers who do not require a business account or have a minimum order limit higher than what I'm willing to spend on a fun hobby any given month.

I bet I'm common as mud in this aspect, with many like me out there.

I only realized this by reading and participating in this thread, too.
 
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Online westfw

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #94 on: June 28, 2021, 09:57:22 pm »
I've been an "electronics hobbyist" for about 50 years now, since I helped my father put together a Heathkit stereo.  I had one of the kits with the spring terminals, I had my own Heathkit, and I read voraciously - "projects" books, Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, QST, "Electronics Shop" in HS, and so on.  Components were really expensive then, especially if you hadn't discovered the mail-order surplus dealers, and I wasn't that well off, so a lot of projects were more lusted after rather than actually built...

It was probably 1976 or so, when Popular Electronics published their 'COSMAC Elf" single-board computer project based on the CDP1802 for "as little as $80" that I realized that nearly every project I had built or wanted to build could be PROGRAMMED instead of hard-wired (random blinky things - check.  Electronic lock - check.  "Annoyer" booby trap - check.  Pong, Electronic Dice, digital clock, "lie detector" - yep.  Pretty much anything other than radio (which for some reason I wasn't much interested in.)  But $80 (about $400 in 2021 dollars) was still too dear, so my 1802 experiments stayed "on paper."  (even though individual projects were $25 or more..)

Midway through my University EE degree, at a school abounding with Mainframes and S-100 machines, I figuredout that not only could you program most of the things that I was interested in, but that programs also offered nearly "instant gratification" and permitted you to fix mistakes and try out new variations SO much quicker than real hardware.  So I became a programmer.  Mostly on mainframes, and then on "big" embedded systems, doing networking stuff - very lucrative, you know.  But I carefully followed the hobbyist computing scene, from S-100 to Apple 2 to IBMPC, and BASIC52, early PICs, Basic Stamp, AVRs.
It's been pretty much inevitable that programming would replace electronics for many "projects" for a very long time...
The Arduino is just the latest (and perhaps most successful) entry in that process.

 
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Offline xrunner

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #95 on: June 29, 2021, 12:20:59 am »
Pretty much anything other than radio (which for some reason I wasn't much interested in.)  ...

But now radio too.  :) SDR (software defined radio) has taken over.

Except for a few front-end parts such as an attenuator and rf amp, the signal is digitized and it's all programming from there.  :-//
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Offline hamster_nz

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #96 on: June 29, 2021, 01:40:41 am »
What Arduino and the like is doing is opening up the scope and quality of what can be achieved as a hobbyist on a pocket-money budget. The range of inexpensive sensors now available is just awesome.

I think that the learning curve to get out of the "Arduino and wire jumper" projects to a more traditional project (audio, radio, automotive) is much higher than it was, and there is limited material to guide you.

It needs quite a few more skills and equipment - it used to be that if you could solder some through-hole parts to veroboard you could build something meaningful - a guitar amp, a power supply or a radio receiver for much less than the cost of a retail equivalent.

At least for me, finding any meaningful projects that you can't just buy off the shelf for less the the cost of parts is also very hard. Hence why all my projects are largely meaningless.  ;)



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Offline Siwastaja

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #97 on: June 29, 2021, 07:19:08 am »
What Arduino and the like is doing is opening up the scope and quality of what can be achieved as a hobbyist on a pocket-money budget. The range of inexpensive sensors now available is just awesome.

That is true, but it has also blurred the meaning of "achieving". I mean, it's very easy to buy pre-engineered modules and write a few lines of code to initialize them to get Incredible Things done. Personally, I "built a radio" when maybe 6 years old. I was so proud of it; built a functional radio all by myself! But let's face it, I just dismantled a working radio, took a cardboard box, made some holes for the speaker and antenna and glued/taped the existing working radio inside it. Arduino is more than that, of course, but the problem is the same.

Because as long as this works, as long as you can buy the shield (and have the library) which does the thing it's all fine. But then, if you want to do something a bit different where pre-engineered module simply does not exist, you hit a total vertical wall that is so steep there is no way to get over it. You may not even be able to recognize the wall.

This is frequently seen when overconfident Arduino hobbyists + some young business-oriented guy get the idea of changing the world by bootstrapping a brainstormed business on Kickstarter. Such endeavors basically always fail because the result after two years of failed promises and a few millions is a box full of Arduinos and hot melt glue in a 3D printed box but it still doesn't work because increasing the number of Arduinos doesn't compensate for the lack of design. The Arduino here, again, is just an indicator. They could have hired a proper designer who understood what needs to be done, and then they could have a custom Arduino shield performing the task properly. But then again, if they did that, the very same designer would have just "optimized out" the now-unnecessary Arduino.

So I really do see Arduino as an important stepping stone which does mostly good, but like always with any technology, there are traps and you can fall into them.
 
The following users thanked this post: tooki, Jacon, Nominal Animal

Offline xrunner

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #98 on: June 29, 2021, 11:08:51 am »
Such endeavors basically always fail because the result after two years of failed promises and a few millions is a box full of Arduinos and hot melt glue in a 3D printed box but it still doesn't work ...

That's classic I gotta remember that one!  :-DD
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Offline Bradlez

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #99 on: June 29, 2021, 01:19:33 pm »
Imagine in an alternate timeline where PIC18F based Arduino boards reigned supreme instead of ATMEGA boards. I wonder if the world would be much different.
 


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