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Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?

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madires:

--- Quote from: rstofer on June 27, 2021, 03:08:53 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!

--- End quote ---

RasPi is luxury. Ever tried linux m68k?

rstofer:

--- Quote from: madires on June 27, 2021, 03:57:04 pm ---
--- Quote from: rstofer on June 27, 2021, 03:08:53 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!

--- End quote ---

RasPi is luxury. Ever tried linux m68k?

--- End quote ---

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

PrecisionAnalytic:

--- Quote from: FriedMule on June 19, 2021, 09:27:54 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? :-)

--- End quote ---

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.

Nominal Animal:
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.

westfw:
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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