General > General Technical Chat
Is the electronics hobby dead?
MosherIV:
Hi
--- Quote --- As mentioned, in many ways "we" have it as sweet as ever. With the popularity of things like Arduino and raspberry pi - biased towards those who either don't have much experience in electronics,
--- End quote ---
Well said buriedcode. :-+
If anything, the growing world of Arduino has got more people interrested in electronics than before but in a different way. As someone else, no they are not the classic type of person wants to put together some circuit because it is cheaper or you simply cannot buy it, they are they type people who want to build something and now have the tools to do.
As buriedcode says, stuff is so cheap and available now that it is so much easier to get into electronics. When I started, there was very little choice in multimeters, you just chose one from Maplins or Radioshak or (if were lucky enough to have access to Farnell or RS) an expensive professional meter.
My pennies worth :-+
chris_leyson:
Unfortunately the old ways of doing things are dying off and being replaced by abstracted plug and play things like Arduinos. I'm not saying that Arduinos are bad but can you learn assembler on an Arduino. There are probably people reading that comment and thinking "who the hell writes code in assembler", well somebody has to write libraries for your compiler or interpreter. And that is just from a software perspective, too much cut and paste with no real understanding of the basic principles. I've seen people cut and paste pages of Matlab code that you could have written in just a few lines if the underlying mathematical principles were understood :palm:
I think the same is true from a hardware point of view, who builds things from scratch these days when you can buy it ready made and probably cheaper as well. It's easy to cut and paste circuits from an app note but if you don't understand the underlying principles expect to get your fingers burnt, in some case quite literally, "wow this switched mode power supply is chucking out a lot of heat" for example. At least there are young people on the EEVblog forum letting the magic smoke out of things :)
And then there is the whole service and repair point of view, I've got a small 20W SMPS sitting on my desk that came out of an old router, financially it isn't worth fixing or replacing when you can buy a better router for very little cost these days, but morally it's worth fixing because why turn a potentially working router into landfill.
The old school traditional ways of doing things are dying off but the hobby is evolving and changing.
bktemp:
--- Quote from: chris_leyson on July 10, 2016, 12:33:56 pm ---Unfortunately the old ways of doing things are dying off and being replaced by abstracted plug and play things like Arduinos.
--- End quote ---
Exactly.
I wouldn't say electronics hobby is dead, but it is changing because all electronic devices we use are changing:
Today we have a much higher level of integration: 30-40 years ago you had to build your own computer yourself, because it was much cheaper to buy all parts and assemble them yourself. Today you buy a single chip controller loaded with many peripherals for much less only the CPU ic did cost at that time. So it simply does not make sense to build a lot of stuff yourself if you can buy it much cheaper.
But also the develepoment has changed: 30 years ago you had large boards full of all kind of analogue and digital ics for all the functionallity you needed. Today you can do almost everything in software. So you don't care much less about hardware, because you can buy highly specialized ics for almost everything and configure them in software.
homebrew:
--- Quote from: wilfred on July 10, 2016, 11:56:12 am ---All you can do is not look disdainfully down your nose at the people who show an interest in plugging modules together and thus drive them away before they can get hooked.
If you look down on the Arduino crowd. Why do you?
Of course the answer is "too feel superior". Great.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, but that was not my point. Everybody is free to do what ever he wants to and I don't care. So why should I feel superior? My point exactly is that these people have little chance to "get hooked". And here is why ...
Doing a hobby properly involves (at least for me) to develop some deep level of expertise in a certain area. Being it model airplane building or collecting stamps. But by commercializing such an area a lot of this is taken away. There are much less drivers anymore to learn the underlying principles.
I mean look at these modules and boards. Arduino even managed to offset the connectors from the 0.1" grid so you can't use them easily on combination with your typical perfboard/breadboard. WHY?
But things like these are not restricted to electronics only. One can see this happening in the R/C community, too. Go in your typical R/C-shop and look for an R/C-glider kit where you would construct your model from individual woodern parts. You could learn so much from these kits and develop so many new skills. Now, 99% of the kits are "ready-to-fly", contain mostly fibre parts or are made from foam entirely. If the plane breaks - nevermind - you can buy a new one. It's so cheap!
So my point is that everything is getting too cheap (not in money but in effort). Without that pain of figuring out the details, the reward you get is also very minimal - probably not enough to keep you in it on the long run.
Tepe:
--- Quote from: chris_leyson on July 10, 2016, 12:33:56 pm ---There are probably people reading that comment and thinking "who the hell writes code in assembler", well somebody has to write libraries for your compiler or interpreter.
--- End quote ---
They are typically written in high level languages. Which is both sensible and economically responsible.
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