General > General Technical Chat
Is the electronics hobby dead?
CatalinaWOW:
I can see this same thread in a newspaper 75 years ago, asking about the death of our hobby. People are no longer building their own knife switches and are using insulated wire to make their connections. Where is the skill in that? Why can't people use post insulators and bare wire to connect things. Why can't they build their switches instead of buying them. No more galena crystals, they are actually using valves as detectors. Where is the skill in using a pre-packaged valve instead of finding the sweet spot on your crystal?
The worldwide market has made a lot of things cheap and easy to buy that used to be expensive. Which lets us spend our energy doing the unique things that interest us, rather than spending all the time putting together the basics. Even in the basics areas, people are using their skills to put together instruments that used to be the dreams of national laboratories, and doing it for far less than the cost of purchasing the capability. Check the volt nuts and time nuts threads. Even the oldest skills/techniques get used. I have built my own switches for unique applications. Using the best of old school and modern materials and techniques. (Brass, high density polyethylene, CNC machining). If I needed to do something similar again I might take another step into the future and use 3D printing to make a prettier and more sophisticated switch.
Kilrah:
--- Quote from: Buriedcode on July 10, 2016, 01:51:09 pm ---The days where electronics as a 'useful' hobby - that is, using your knowledge and wits to build something that solves a real problem - aren't over yet. It is just we see more and more novelty or 'gadget' projects being posted in hackaday, instructables, maker etc.. that use $120 worth of prebuilt modules, a ridiculously powerful raspberry pi and large OS's to make a string of LED's pulse to music. That is the hobby side! you may not see the point, but the creators do it for shits'n'giggles. Sure the design is completely overkill so is hardly commercially viable, but its a hobby.
--- End quote ---
There is a big difference however in the fact that when you had to build the basic circuit once you were done you could usually quite easily move out of the "hobby" thing and actually start selling your thing as a product without any major changes if you felt like it.
Now precisely given the building blocks are overkill, once you managed to make something good with them if you wanted to bring it to market you'd probably havce to throw it in the trash, start over from scratch, and make something more appropriate and specialized for the purpose so it can be priced in a way you've got a chance of selling it... but having been able to put the Pi-based thing together has taught you approximately nothing of what you need to do so.
jpb:
I started electronics as a hobby in the 1970s (as a teenager) and it inspired me to do electronic engineering at university. But then it became a job and I became less enthused about doing it as a hobby.
Also there were big changes - surface mount, the move to digital which doesn't feel quite the same as true analogue electronics and the fact that electronics items became consumable.
The fact that DVD players, TVs and so on are cheap throw-away items has affected even those who earn a living in the area - I have a friend who runs a family tv repair business but when the cost of a new item is only about an hour or twos labour costs and the fact that the item being repaired was not built to last makes it rather disheartening. Also smart phones have every sensor under the sun in a tiny package so it is hard to think of anything electronic that you might build that is not already covered.
BUT, I have now come back to electronics as a hobby after a gap of several decades and there are some positives. PCBs can be bought cheaply from China, a lab can be equipped cheaply, interesting old stuff can be bought off e-bay. I do it for my own education and enjoyment. I am very slowly designing a GPSDO. It presents plenty of challenges. I'm never going to build anything that is a commercial proposition but I'm keeping my electronics knowledge alive (I've switched to computer programming as a day job) which perhaps makes me more employable.
So in some ways electronics is more doable now than for many years - there is also forums like this on the internet so you don't have to rely on fellow nuts who live locally ;)
rrinker:
I see a thread like this come up every few weeks in a forum dedicated to my other hobby, model railroading. "it's dead, it's dead" cry the Chicken Littles.
Me, I merrily go on designing and building my model railroad, combined with my other hobby which is also not dead, electronics. I used to do more at home with computers, but since it's my day job, I kind of just one my systems at home to just work without a lot of mucking around.
I will say it was Dave's videos and this forum, plus the Arduino, which really got me ramped back up in electronics. I was going to build a lot of the control electronics for my model railroad myself, but more or less in the sense of using someone else's design and just building them myself (like building a computer today - it's really just fitting together the jigsaw puzzle pieces). Now, however, I am designing my own control and monitoring circuits using Arduinos to drive the signals and points and collecting occupancy information in manageable 'nodes'. And writing most of the controlling software myself, both on the Arduino side and the PC that controls the whole thing. I will probably 'cheat' and use an existing communications protocol rather than try to develop my own though. All fun.
Lukas:
It's definitely a great time for 'advanced hobbyists'. Thanks to digikey and mouser, you can get pretty much every part delivered right to your desk within reasonable amount of time. $100 gets you a 4-Layer PCB from china, there's no shortage of MCUs of all shapes and sizes and FPGA and the required tools. All this enables projects like this one: http://hforsten.com/homemade-synthetic-aperture-radar.html Wouldn't have been possible that easily 10 years ago.
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