10 years of EEVblog and what changed in electronics?

[nardev]

I don't know if anyone have mentioned this before. But 10 years is quite a long time and maybe it would be nice to see Dave making video about what changed in some of the following:

1. Is there any components that exist now and didn't exist before?
    Or was quite rare and not is quite common?
2. What test equipment was considered as expensive 10 years ago and now it's much more affordable?
3. How manufacturing of PCB/PCBa services changed. What was not available and how differently things were back at 2009 or before from now?


and so on..

perhaps, if anyone else would like to see this kind of a video, you could post some more questions...

[mk_]

1. Is there any components that exist now and didn't exist before?
    Or was quite rare and not is quite common?
2. What test equipment was considered as expensive 10 years ago and now it's much more affordable?
3. How manufacturing of PCB/PCBa services changed. What was not available and how differently things were back at 2009 or before from now?
.

1. ARM everywhere now, AVR more or less nonexisting anymore, only in legacy products (at least what I can oversee). High speed analog stuff is aviable now
2. Low priced DSOs startet to become mainstream during this time.
 
4. Jim Williams lived 10 years ago....

[boB]

Silicon Carbide is more widespread and in fairly wide use for power electronics.

GaN as well but maybe not as much as SiC

[nardev]

 

Ah, i though ppl would like this one 

[Howardlong]

2. Low priced DSOs startet to become mainstream during this time.

Definitely this. I remember picking up my own first DSO, a TDS2024, a 200MHz 4ch colour DSO with miniscule memory for £1800 (~US$2200). Despite its limitations, I did a huge amount of successful and lucrative development with it. Much of the time in those days I decoded serial buses in my head, although for more complex decodes I also had an LA...

I also have a Logicport logic analyser from around this time, ISTR they were about $400 or so, I think they're still sold. Again, despite its short memory compared to today's options, it did me proud. With a 500MHz sampling rate across 34 channels, it actually still has life in it.

Now we have reasonably priced MSOs with integrated decode and trigger options, and the TDS2024 & Logicport remain in cupboards and drawers.

During this time, there has been a dramatic shift away from parallel buses to higher speed serial buses, so the need for large numbers of channels on LAs has largely disappeared.

[brabus]

- I remember FPGAs being off limits for a hobbyst; now basically everyone has soldered a TQFP100 Xilinx and tinkered with it.

- PCBA was an option only for business users, the same goes for homebrew PnP; PCBA is now cheaper than the bare PCBs and parts, and homebrew PnP seems to gain attention.

- 3D printing has been a large disappointment. Quality 3D printing is, like in 2009, expensive and best indicated for business purposes.

[nardev]

I see, this can go in many directions. Maybe to make certain sub topics.

[schmitt trigger]

-Firewire disappeared, making USB the de-facto serial standard for general purpose computing devices (and even specialized ones too!).

-Several influential semiconductor vendors were acquired or merged. National Semi, Linear, International Rectifier, Fairchild. I am sure I am missing someone.

-Huawei. Enough said.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

-There was nothing like a esp32 for just a few $, with WiFi, BT, two cores and plenty of flash, RAM and MHz. The king of the µCs if you ask me. We can at last use C++ objects and strings comfortably and without fear of running out of memory at any time, or the code running at a snails pace.

-For the first time ever, some chinese scopes are better than everything else.

[nardev]

-There was nothing like a esp32 for just a few $, with WiFi, BT, two cores and plenty of flash, RAM and MHz. The king of the µCs if you ask me. We can at last use C++ objects and strings comfortably and without fear of running out of memory at any time, or the code running at a snails pace.

-For the first time ever, some chinese scopes are better than everything else.

Well, it is "Chinese" but the core is "American" Tensilica Xtensa LX6. Anyway, the owner is who makes the profit.. It's not Chinese or American at the end.

IMHO Espressif gave a great lesson to plenty of very arrogant companies in US and Europe. If you asked NXP or Microchip, the "smart bulb" should cost 200 EUR. That's how they behave. Where the end cost would actually be same as for Espressif now.

Could be that they are also in the rising so the price is bit unrealistic.

Also, i haven't find any great project utilizing BLE on ESP32 so far. The frameworks don't even support it well for now. Even the mongoose-os.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

After 42 years, I can't care less about the instruction set. As long as it performs ok-ish, which all do nowadays, it absolutely doesn't matter. Could well be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck cpu and I wouldn't care, so to speak

[Bud]

3D TVs appeared and disappeared   

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

3D TVs appeared and disappeared   

And many (most?) people now watch youtube rather than the mainstream media TVs.

[sixtimesseven]

- Dirt cheap PCB's, two layers 10x10cm for 2-5USD, 4 Layers for 20USD, 6 for about a 120USD with superfast manufacturing and delivering
- Kicad, it is getting to the point where it gets viable for commercial stuff. Digikey started doing Kicad part lib... I mean that says it all...
- Digikey ships from 50 Bucks to Europe, ships in two days, handels all the taxes and eats the import handling fees now.
- PC and phones have become pretty boring with little need to upgrade
- Lots of freeish / limited maker type software for non commercial use
- ST micro started (as far as I know) to "arduino-style" their products with focus of ease of use, streamlined IDE, giving out really cheap/free dev boards and everybody is jumping on that train now
- Aliexpress etc has really taken off and gotten mainstream. So much cheap electronics/parts/boards now... On the other hand it's no fun anymore to try and build/sell your own small product - It will get cloned anyway
- FTDI 

[sixtimesseven]

- 3D printing has been a large disappointment. Quality 3D printing is, like in 2009, expensive and best indicated for business purposes.

Depends. Additive tech is still limited but for quick adapters / prototype there are many machines which work plug and play out of the box which was not my impression 10y ago
Then there is the UV resin stuff which is getting cheap and is pretty amazing in my opinion...
Metals ... Not so much

[rsjsouza]

2. Low priced DSOs startet to become mainstream during this time.

Definitely this.

This could be applied to test gear in general with the explosion of China's online retail commerce with Aliexpress, Banggood and their expanded influence to the west over traditional eBay and Amazon websites.

- In 2009 the disposable DMM market was manual range and 2000 counts, with companies like Mastech and Uni-T dominating. Nowadays, lots of OEMs from China dominate the low cost market (Zotek, Zoyi, Richmeters, Aneng, Bside, AlloSun,etc.) i all ranges of features and counts. You can buy anything up to 20000 counts and heaps of functions without breaking the bank.
- Similar scenario for the benchtop multimeter market, where you couldn't fathom getting one for less than 1500USD.
- In 2009 you had absolutely no chance of buying a logic analyzer for less than hundreds of dollars. Nowadays it is almost the norm buying one that is PC-based or built into your oscilloscope for a very small price.
- In 2009 you could not dream about a VNA, while nowadays the NanoVNA and lots knockoffs give a port of entry for hobbyists (they quickly find out how difficult and complex a VNA is, but at least they get the idea).
- Similar thing about function/arbitrary generators, where FPGA-based designs dominated over the previous DSS and pure analog versions.
- Explosion of ultra-cheap switching lab power supplies...

...and so on.

-There was nothing like a esp32 for just a few $, with WiFi, BT, two cores and plenty of flash, RAM and MHz.

The wireless offers from various vendors pretty much exploded - a hobbyist can get kits for quite little money and with features only available for the large OEMs that could afford the ticket price to enter in this game.

Just one year earlier the BeagleBoard was released, which brought a big OEM processor (Cortex A8) to the masses - nowadays there are so many that is too hard to count. Not to mention the serious internet browsing on smartphones was not ubiquitous (followed by the reduction in phone bills, of course  )

In consumer, the digital media gave way to the bitstream. I still love my DVD and BD collection, but it is dead. Speaking of video media, ten years ago we were still shocked by the demise of the HD-DVD format, which gave way to the Blu-Ray.

Too many things changed to count...

[bsfeechannel]

The TEA thread didn't exist.

[nardev]

The TEA thread didn't exist.

What's TEA?

[I wanted a rude username]

What's TEA?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/

Well, it is "Chinese" but the core is "American" Tensilica Xtensa LX6. Anyway, the owner is who makes the profit.. It's not Chinese or American at the end.

Not sure I follow this logic, but anyway, bet you a Sarajevsko Pivo that Espressif's next new chip will be RISC-V based.

[NiHaoMike]

I would have to say the most significant change within the last 10 years for hobby electronics was the availability of cheap components. Small computers also got a lot cheaper - there's the Raspberry Pi of course, but also $5 smartphones that were of great interest in altcoin mining when it peaked in 2016 or so.

- 3D printing has been a large disappointment. Quality 3D printing is, like in 2009, expensive and best indicated for business purposes.

Is a $350 Prusa Mini considered "expensive"?

- Similar thing about function/arbitrary generators, where FPGA-based designs dominated over the previous DSS and pure analog versions.

Or what about $5 3 channel high speed USB DACs based on an ASIC?
https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-fl2k/wiki

[nardev]

I really hope @eevblog would think of making a video about this. Considering several aspects, from manufacturing, parts, chips etc...

[daqq]

Unexpected: Cheap test gear with awesome parameters (especially scopes), FPGAs that boggle the mind, actually useful machine learning, SDR explosion, actually useful free IDEs from chip makers are commonplace.
Expected: Storage capacity of everything (RAM, disks) has increased, the number of cores on everything increased.
Bad: Mergers everywhere, indicating a heading towards a few megacompanies and no competition. IoT obsession and connectivity obsession. Increase in consumer idiocy.

[beanflying]

Locally the more or less last of the slow death of the specialty Component retailer and the impact on entering Electronics as a Hobby. There is currently maybe a handful of worthwhile sellers clinging on and the last major chain is becoming more and more a WOFTAM.

In Oz 2, 3 and 4 decades ago even in smaller country towns (10,000 ish populations) there was generally a place to go and buy the basics if not a full range of kits, bits and in a lot of cases staffed by enthusiasts or knowledgeable people.

If I wanted to go and buy a Transistor or 1/4W resistor I have a minimum of 3 hours drive.

The counter to this is the price reduction and buy a board and program it and call yourself a hobbyist for under $10 but generally not knowing the basics about Electronics.

The Industry or established Engineers/Hobbyist is another matter but how do you start in with online or maybe school programming boards into the hobby or industry in the modern era?

This may not be the same elsewhere but with the Likes of Fry's seemingly going out the backdoor and the likes of Radio Shack almost toast elsewhere seems to be going the same way.

[Doctorandus_P]

China happened. Instead of buying a single transistor, you do not have to leave your desk to buy an assoment box of 200 transistors for about the same price.

When I look at The Big Fella's, they sell standard SMD resistors, transistors, etc in single pieces. Which is an absurd nightmare. At LCSC you buy cut tape of 100 pieces (their minimum quantity) for about the price of 3 items from The Big Fella's.

The Big Fella's also do not scale anymore. If you buy 100's or even 1000's of the same part, the price used to drop to 1/10th or less of single pieces. Now they're all in the same boat and overcharge significantly.

Benchtop DMM's used to be big boxes chuck full of electronics. Now the boxes are still the same size, but they've got a PCB chugged in a corner somewhere. Some time ago I was interested in a decent benchtop DMM, but had a depth limit of around 18cm, just as normal scopes do. Good luck finding a decent one.

"arduino" (sadly) became a thing.

Computer performance stagnated.
We're still stuck at a few GHz, and Single Thread performance hardly doubled in the last 10 years. Most of the gain in more core and faster peripherals.
I don't care about computer performance anymore. My PC "just works". Even though it's a 12 year old box chugging along on some Linux distro.

A sad one:
The groundlayers and pioneers of early chip design are near (or have reached) the end of their life.

[Electro Detective]

Nowadays there's more fake parts around, with suspect quality to freak out and irritate electronics manufacturers and repairers,
crippling their businesses honoring warranty claims   

Battery leakage can be relied on to happen more often, especially in expensive equipment 

TVs and the electronics have improved and gotten lighter and thinner, but unfortunately only a handful of TV stations are watchable. 
Except for the weather forecasts, most News 'stories' are BS based,
and the idiots that produce and appear in the childish, stupid, ludicrous, cheap shock value commercials    belong in insane asylums,
and or on their own island away from humanity. Same deal for those that watch that audio/visual garbage and want to discuss it as well      

Fear Flu scare campaigns are now so over the top compared to old school swine, bird, mad cow panics etc
and it appears most everyone including the population at a top electronics forum, buy into it without question or opposition,
pumping it along with no skeptism, no conspiracy theories, no verifiable data backed by honest independent medical and biological professionals etc, zip nada..
perhaps it's easier on the brain to just go with the flow in 2020, and avoid being considered uninformed, ignorant, different, troublesome, tardish, trollish, or 'special'   


DJ may want to consider a 'BYO everything' street party to celebrate 10 years of EEVblog 

and invite any survivors of the big C of 2020,
once it's blown away and forgotten, just like the previous ones