| General > General Technical Chat |
| Is the electronics hobby dead? |
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| mindcrime:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on May 12, 2021, 04:58:12 pm --- --- Quote from: mindcrime on May 12, 2021, 04:35:41 am --- --- Quote ---(1) Chemicals and materials are harder to get, more expensive to obtain. --- End quote --- Can't agree. That big bottle of MG Chemicals 99.99% IPA in the lab? The one labeled "for professional use only"? Yeah... when I was coming up, I had nowhere near me to get something like that, and if I had, they wouldn't have sold it to me. Now, I jump on amazon, click a button, and 2 days later it's on my doorstep. Fantastic. --- End quote --- There is much truth to the claim that chemicals are harder to get now. Sure, you can order IPA easily, but other chemicals? Not so much. When I was a kid I was interested in chemistry and could go down to the local drug store and buy a wide variety of chemicals. If they didn't have it, they could get it for me. They had no problem selling chemicals to a 12-year-old. Today the situation is very different. Drug stores still sell IPA, but that's about it. Nearly everything else is off limits. Commercial chemical and scientific suppliers won't sell chemicals to private individuals at all--you have to be a business or an educational institution. These companies assume that private individuals buying this stuff are either terrorists building a bomb, or drug dealers running a meth lab. In some states in the U.S. private individuals can't even buy glassware like beakers and flasks. --- End quote --- That's a fair point, although it sounds like more of a concern for people practicing "hobby chemistry" than "hobby electronics". Still, you have a point about the terrorism point, and all the "WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN???" paranoia. Shit, where I live you're even limited in how much allergy medicine (with pseudoephedrine) you can buy, because the people who make meth (or something) extract the pseudoephedrine from it to use. :-( All of that said, the flip-side is, if you want to start a company to make the process of buying chemicals easier, it's pretty cheap and easy to start an LLC (at least here in NC, in the US), and getting a business banking account is pretty trivial here as well. One challenge though, is that some places won't ship to an address that's listed as a "residential" address, even if you run your company from home. Obviously a lot of this stuff will vary from country to country due to differing regulations. The one other angle on getting chemicals, is that you can sometimes get certain chemicals from China (where else?) that you otherwise couldn't get, by having the seller label them as "research chemicals" (or something like that) which clear customs with less problems (or so I hear). I have not personally tried this, but it's something I've heard a lot about. It seems to be more in the context of "designer drugs", but if you could make the right contact with the chemistry equivalent of Shenzhen, I bet you could get them to sell you just about anything. |
| RichC:
Having recently gotten back into electronics I'm actually quite enjoying making little smt boards at home. My cheap Chinese cnc will cut 8 mil traces without any problems and will do 6 mil with a little care. I've even done double sided boards on it using small nails for alignment. For reflow I'm using a little ptc hotplate off ebay. For the price ($10) it's hard to beat and because I bought a DC model I can run it off a bench supply and ramp the temperature up slowly. Feels easier and probably quicker for me than hand soldering. |
| Alex Eisenhut:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on May 12, 2021, 04:58:12 pm ---They had no problem selling chemicals to a 12-year-old. --- End quote --- Same here. I would regularly raid the pharmacy down my street as a kid for all the strike anywhere matches, saltpeter, and sulfur they had and no one raised an eyebrow... Hilarious times! Now I can't even get a small vial of harmless oxalic acid anymore to clean rust off ceramics, etc |
| CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on May 12, 2021, 11:26:06 pm --- --- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on May 12, 2021, 04:58:12 pm ---They had no problem selling chemicals to a 12-year-old. --- End quote --- Same here. I would regularly raid the pharmacy down my street as a kid for all the strike anywhere matches, saltpeter, and sulfur they had and no one raised an eyebrow... Hilarious times! Now I can't even get a small vial of harmless oxalic acid anymore to clean rust off ceramics, etc --- End quote --- The rules are sort of random. Here in the US oxalic acid is hard to get most places, but readily available in hardware and building supply stores. Other materials show similar foibles. Hydrochloric acid is hard to find except at pool supply stores. |
| eti:
Not one bit. Ardweeeenos are everywhere, and you can now buy a special device to flash an LED called a Raspberry Pi. |
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