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R.I.P for D.I.Y Or Long Live Open Source?
Embedded Geek writes "Scientific American has an article on the decline of science hobbyists. It presents a long litany of woe you'd expect about the "Good Old Days" (the death of classic electronic tinkering magazines, Edmund Scientific's corporate changes, and the cancelation of SciAm's own "Amateur Scientist" column), but also discusses some of the real trends in technology that have caused these changes. Declining manufacturing costs now make it cheaper to buy a telescope, radio, or computer than to build one yourself. The increased complexity of our gadgets doesn't help either (Ever tried to fix surface mount components with a soldering iron at your kitchen table? Don't!!)
"
Personally, I found the tranformation of science amateurs into "quasi-professionals" intriguing. The Society for Amateur Scientists now holds sessions on how to publish research and how to claim tax deductions for home laboratories. Also, amateur astronmers are making great strides in comet discovery. Being that most of the people in the open source movement are software professionals, it becomes easy to draw an analogy between it and tinkering of yore.
Cheaper professional quality equipment doesn't mean an end to amateur science. It just means a refocus.
Where 20 years ago, the efforts of the amateur were largely directed to the construction of equipment, now he or she can work at actual research.
This is of course an extreme generalization, but just because the days of saudering irons and garages might be winding down, that doesn't mean that dedicated individuals outside of the academic and professional communities will no longer be contributing to the advancement of science.
I will miss the amateur column in Sci Am though, I got a lot of good ideas from there.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Remember those electronic kits everyone had as a kid from Radio Shack? You know, you could build all sorts of neat things with capacitors and resistors and stuff. Who has those now? I want a really good one to play with.
Anyone?
Egad! Now my plans for world domination are thwarted!
Unless... anyone know where I can find an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator?
It's actually very expensive to set yourself up as a scientist. The problem is, while there's still cheap equipment around, much of the cutting-edge research can no longer be done on it. As our understanding of what makes our environment operate gets deeper, we've the unfortunate habit of requiring more complex equipment.
While I'm not a scientist, I do work with them, and the cost of setting up even a basic research lab is prohibitive for an interested amateur, unless their name ends in Murdoch or Branson.
Alister
Declining manufacturing costs now make it cheaper to buy a telescope, radio, or computer than to build one yourself.
:)
A telescope or a radio, perhaps, but it's still cheaper to build a computer youself, especially with free operating systems rather than $200+ ones.
But, I refuse to buy a pre-built computer. I mean, sure, Compaq and Dell make some pretty decent pre-built machines (some which would be very difficult to build at home, such as the iPaq Legacy-Free system), but I would only use them as workstations in a business environment.
For pre-built machines, tech support is usually pretty crummy (I can troubleshoot my own hardware problems, thank you very much), and everything is integrated on board. Sound card dies? Send the whole system in for repairs for a month to get it fixed. Personally, I'd rather just yank the SoundBlaster out of my machine and buy another, and install it in the same day.
Don't get me wrong, pre-built machines have their place, but for the hardcore computer technicians, it is certainly not in their own home.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Grrrrrr! It was hell trying to solder that thing back on without the use of a nice magnifier, overhead light, tweezers, glue, and everything else necessary for doing SMT the right way.
Seems to me that someone was doing some network MP3 players with SMT and building the whole thing by hand. I guess some people still build things in their basements . . . sickos!
I forget who said it, but it bears repeating: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It's the same thing. If my friend's interests were with tinkering with lenses and long metal tubes, he'd be doing that.
If there were some special need he had that no manufacturer met, some special lens he needed, maybe this would be an issue. But companies stay in business by providing what their customers want. Especially when their customers are chiefly hobbyists.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I don't care how sophisticated the manufacturing processes are, a mass built telescope will never be as good as what you can build yourself (with the right equipment). It takes many hours to grind a mirror and many more hours to align it properly and the big manufacturers just can't justify taking the time to do it right; it's too expensive.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
I think the title of the topic gives a valid reason for the decline of electronic tinkering. I get my desire to tinker from my grandfather who would play with cb radios and what not, however now its so much cheaper to tinker with code and in my opinion more rewarding with its near instant gradification. I don't think these people have disappeared their minds are just now occupied with writing code.
it seems to me that the internet has come in where hobby tinker mags left off. there's TONS of information available on home-built electronics, not only free but providing easy access to the originator in case you have trouble. just email the person and get it from the horse's mouth.
This is certainly only one out of a million possible views, but I see it as a reflection of our society as a whole. People these days would just rather have "somebody else" do it for them in most aspects of their lives. Obviously this is a very broad statement, but it seems that we're seeing less and less "do it yourselfers" in virtually every area. Too bad, when a geek locks himself (or to be fair, herself as well) in a room to work on something, we've seen some pretty cool things emerge which have undeniably made technology history.
Now.
When you do, you'll see that here, it isn't cheaper to buy than build, even more so with exotic stuff. And some stuff can't be bought, like EME antennas, etc.
There's no feeling in the world like that of having your voice reflected off the moon, and having built the stuff yourself.
The magazine of the ARRL, QST, is filled with DIY projects, and QEX is ALL DIY stuff.
The ARRL handbook says that over half of all hams build gear. Doesn't seem dead to me...
-twb
How did you do that?
Some folks at Extreme Tech also said that DIY computers will be dead with more or less the same reasons. Is this a trend or what?
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
I did what the Society for Amateur scientists suggests and set up a home laboratory i collect tax deductions on. Setting up a home laboratory is easy, you can have fun with it, and make some profit as well. I'm a big proponent of it. I do research with mine. In chemistry. Chemistry research.
It of course has nothing to do with Ecstasy at all.
What? the DanceSafe Bumper stickers? Um.. i just, uh.. support their cause and all. That's all. Excuse me, i have to go now.
Maybe you should start your own News for Nerds site and invite all your friends and then you could post whatever story you want.
I'm going to miss that 'ol pinball . . . sniff.
.. come off quite easy with a tool to burn off old paint. Really.
this post is a lie
Well to show my age, I was born in 1980. I had two electronics kits, out of which I built a radio that could pick up WGN and a buzzing thing. Electronics, however, never really caught my eye because in 1982 I had my own TI 99 which cassette player storage and cartridge games. It was far more fascinating then building a radio or buzzing thing, and it did a lot more.
By the time college came around, I considered EE but computer science had already made a larger impact. In college I've tinkered some with electronics. I helped fix a nintendo, a stereo and a light with an EE friend, but I was not convinced to change majors. The reason? Because as fun as it was to fix the nintendo, buying a new one is $30 and as fun as it is to do low level circutry for 2 days, its much more rewarding to have a complete working program in an hour.
Electronics is complicated, expensive and time consuming you just can't do it anymore without a degree. The majority of people who would be attracted to Electronics in the "old days" find Computer work much more accessible.
Lastly, you should all know my kids will learn basic electronics. I might not be into so much, but the hobbist still has some opportunity, although slim.
Rob
I have a Radio Shack a block away from my house, and every time I go in, it's an educational experience.
For them.
I have to explain the difference between ether cable and telephone wiring.
Um. I don't need any help. I know your store better than you do. :P
To be fair PCI has a lot to do with it - too much overhead in the bus interface - before the advent of pci you could wirewrap a NuBus or ISA card with a few jelly-beans
From this page, a very nice history of the column in SciAm (though it was apparently a bit optimistic at the end of the piece):
A Brief History of
"The Amateur Scientist"
Albert Ingalls
"The Amateur Scientist" traces its pedigree to 1928, when famed astronomer Albert Ingalls began the column as "The Backyard Astronomer." Ingalls told amateurs how they could get personally involved in astronomy by building professional-quality instruments and carry out cutting-edge observations. Eventually Ingalls chose to broaden the column's scope to include "how-to's" from all fields of science. When he did, he also changed the department's name to "The Amateur Scientist."
C. L. Stong
Ingalls wrote his column for almost 30 years. When he died in 1954 the publisher selected C. L. Stong to continue the feature. Stong was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse and a master tinkerer who brilliantly extended the column, frequently peppering it with extremely sophisticated projects including home-built lasers and atom smashers. Many working professional scientists say that they first got hooked on science through Stong's amazing columns.
In 1960 Stong compiled a book titled The Amateur Scientist, (Simon and Schuster) the only collection of articles that has ever been published from this column. However, limited to paper and ink, Stong could only fit in 57 projects. Despite being only a partial anthology, never being advertised in Scientific American , and appearing long before the rise of home schooling, Stong's book sold over 10,000 copies. It went out of print in 1972 and is much sought after today by amateur scientists.
Jearl Walker
Stong ran the department for over 20 years until he died in 1977. In 1978, Scientific American hired Jearl Walker, Ph.D. to take over. Walker had caught the publisher's attention thanks to The Flying Circus of Physics, a book Walker wrote which highlighted the fascinating physics of the everyday world. Under Walker's stewardship "The Amateur Scientist" presented fewer how-to projects, and instead focused on the physics of common phenomena. Walker's columns are still frequently consulted by educators and students alike.
Walker resigned from Scientific American in 1990 after 12 years. Collectively, Ingalls, Stong and Walker account for 90 percent of all articles.
Forrest Mims
After Walker left, Scientific American decided to rededicate the column to hands-on projects and so they hired Forrest Mims III, a renowned writer of books for Radio Shack and an accomplished amateur scientist. They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins. Not wanting to be perceived as supporting Creationism, Scientific American fired Mims. Mims charged religious discrimination and the story was carried through most major US news outlets.
Although the incident didn't diminish Scientific American's commitment to the column, it did make them gun-shy about hiring another amateur scientist to write it. But professionals tend to be too narrowly focused in their own disciplines. The publisher invited many potential columnists to submit individual articles, and most of these were published under "The Amateur Scientist." But the magazine was unable to find anyone with both professional credentials and the incredible breadth of science knowledge necessary to recapture the popularity the column enjoyed under Stong and Ingalls. And without a regular columnist, the department languished, appearing only sporadically between 1990 and 1995. Most Scientific American readers stopped looking for it when they got a new magazine.
Shawn Carlson
In 1995 the editorial staff discovered the Society for Amateur Scientists. It's Founder and Executive Director was Dr. Shawn Carlson, a physicist and established science writer who had left academe a year earlier to devote his career to helping amateur scientists. Dr. Carlson took over the column in November of that year and immediately returned the column's focus to cutting-edge projects that amateurs can do inexpensively at home. Today, over 1 million Scientific American readers turn to "The Amateur Scientist" every month. The column has never been more popular.
Got Wisdom?
I remember when I was a kid, people actually used to be able to fix thier own TV's and stereo's. My parents had this really cool stereo that included a circuit diagram. (Who does that anymore?) Now adays it requires special training and tools to fix some of these things, IF you can even find spare parts. And if you do there isn't any guarentee that the parts will even be cheaper, than the cost of a new one. The compressor on my fridge goes out. I get a quote for $540 to fix it. I only paid 560 dollars for the thing brand new. I ended up buying a new one. The picture tube goes out on my TV. Well I didn't try to have it fixed. I just bought a new one.
The scale of economics in building consumer devices in 3rd world countries is so great that it isn't really worth the cost of having them repaired. It's often cheaper to buy an new one, and even if it isn't the new features available in the latest devices still make it worthwhile.
My Weblog
This siteis kind of interesting, it has a number of homemade recipes for building bizarre science stuff.
My favorite is the cloud chamber , with this device you can observe radioactive particles. You can actually see the curly little vapor trails that particle scientists observe in major accelerators.
There's also a modification for observing cosmic rays, high energy particles that are zipping through you by the thousands every second.
I've actually been doing more hobby stuff lately. Having more disposable income than your average kid makes a difference. Another difference nowadays is the greater variety of cool gadgets available and the Internet for obtaining them. I actually took time out of my busy weekend to build a flashlight out of super-magnets, some copper wire, and a couple white LEDs. To see the plans, look here. Next weekend, I think I'll do something with muscle wire. Oh, and those 100 ball bearings I just won on eBay, just wait and see...
I remember a day where almost every popular computer mag, PC Magazine, PC Week, the now-defunct Compute, etc. had source code listings in the back that you typed in yourself, usually in Assembly language. They weren't toy programs either, but usually useful utilities, like file managers, text editors, games, etc. Not commercial quality, but still amazing for something that you could enter in by hand.
Those listings, despite being a pain to enter and debug, taught me most of my early programming and software design knowledge before I formally learned it in school, and probably did so for others.
Now, none of the general mags have software you can program yourself. Not even the programmer mags like Dr. Dobbs journal have full working apps anymore, just little code snippets.
Anyone else miss those days?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Honestly Sci Am did enough to kill off thier once good Am Scientist page in the last few years. Once this article was great and had some really good ideas, but ever since the feature's author got his "genius" grant quality control went way way way down. Really the last year or three of the series all they had were a bunch of very difficult to pull off experiemnets (not a problem, it's nice to see some dedication), but also did not even produce the results they were supposed to. Sheesh, the guys didn't even bother looking at the data they produced. Most of thier detection of things uch as "gravitatinal pull of the moon" or "Geomagetic microulsations" were all equiptment atrifacts and not even real data. Yurk.
I think the death of Scientific American is tainting their outlook a little bit.
correct link:
5 Fn ame=CTLG&category%5Fname=CTLG%5F009%5F000%5F000%5F 000&Page=1
http://www.radioshack.com/category.asp?catalog%
That sucker never saw my friend's house again -- the stuff you could make was incredible, and clearly from a time before anyone thought about suing authors for writing potentially injurous copy.
You could build (I kid you not):
(The latter, now that I think of it, would make a great case-cooling system. Gotta go to the garage and find that book...
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
The increased complexity of our gadgets doesn't help either
:-)
Or the (un)availability of not-so-complex devices. (1)
It's easier to make a funny thing with a cheap Motorola 6800 or a Zilog Z80 than with a Intel586 or AMD K7. Both for the hardware side (it's only 40 pins and 2MHz) as for the software side (just a couple of registers).
Also, how "easy" is it these days to add an self-developped extensionboard into your computer? The P2000T and MSX had some nice eurocard extension-slots with an easy to use bus. Heck, you even got the full specifications of everything when you bought the computer.
(1) When I told this on IRC some people responded that I still can mail-order Z80s for AUS$ 20,- (same price as the i386
bash$
You can build PC's at the board level cheaply, sure...but
it doesnt require any real skill to assemble a PC.
Putting together a computer from commodity chips,
woz-in-his-garage-style, requires some skill - perhaps a year or so of intensive study on digital interfacing, but it -WAS- still within reach of
hobbyists.
Of course, that limits you to a sub-20MHz computer, as designing busses much faster than that is more than single-layer PCBs, and kitchen
table soldering and manucfacturing can be expected
to deliver.
Heathkit used to have a number of self-study courses for tacking together 8 and 16-bit low-end
microcontrollers (6800s, 6809s, 8000-series MPUs)
I'm sure I've seen them still for sale on a website somewhere. (They also had courses on fiber optics, using SMDs, etc.)
That is so cool.
They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins.
This is actually a pretty sad story. Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They certainly guaranteed that at least one agnostic (myself) will never burden their subscription department with correspondence.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
DIY nuclear reactor, no joke.
:-)
He almost turned his backyard into a federal toxic waste site, and shortened his life by 5 years or so, but hey, it almost worked!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
You don't solder on a breadboard, hon. You solder on a circuit board... breadboards have holes in them you just stick things into.
this smart comment was brought to you by chyx.org
a scale that could measure weight down to a few millionths of a gram.
dobplans
Build Your Own 4 Inch Dobsonian Telescope
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Dobsonian Evolution
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I built my own Dobsonian!!
Umm...first of all, I don't think the article made any mention of open source. But then again, I suppose one can argue that open source programmers are very much like those amateur scientists. You have a bunch of people who aren't satisfied with the current crop of software, so they decided to build they're own to satisfy a personal curiosity or for just wanting better software.
Which begs the question, how far does this analogy extend? Will we see in a few decades open source losing a lot of its benefits, simply due to companies making better software?
-- Kircle
There is a crucial difference between "then" and "than," a difference which I strongly urge the slashdot editors to learn.
Heh. Once, I created a working AM radio
not following the directions in the book BTW
real well. I had it hooked to the metal
radiator pipe in my bedroom. Ofcourse, being
just a couple miles away from the transmitter helped. Ahh the good old days. I would add
tons of features to the example projects in
the book, and sometimes take other
electronic toys and wire them in too. Once, I
had a toy robot and a thermometer/alarm clock hooked up to it. I went through many of the plastic 200 in One kits. Usualy, I would manage to burn out all of the LEDs on the unit, shortly after I got it, and usualy it's life would end shortly after the frame came apart
Oh, anybody remember the "UFO" game/project
for the 200 in 1 models?
> (Ever tried to fix surface mount components with a soldering iron at your kitchen table? Don't!!)
I've always found that working with SMT is easier than through hole. You have gravity on your side. It will hold the component on the pad while you tack it in place.
Just use a decent soldering iron that has a small enough tip and don't make the mistake of using too small a tip. A too small tip doesn't hold enough heat to flow the solder onto larger SMT pins.
Also make good use of brush on flux and desolder braid. They are your friends when reworking SMT boards.
When laying out your own PCB, SMT components let you get away with drilling far fewer holes and zero ohm resistors let you 'jump' over tracks without using vias.
When it comes to probing, all your signals are generally available on one side. Most SMT parts (except BGA and LCC styles) don't shroud their leads like stand-up electrolytics and transistors do.
One of the primary barriers to messing with this sort of stuff in America is the crappiness of component supply for the hobbyist. I have yet to see anything that comes close to the likes of Radio Spares or Farnell in the UK.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I was born in 1986, and had a DIY radio kit. But my Apple ][ swiftly displaced it based sheerly on what it could do. And, while I have tinkered with EE some over the years, I still remain much more interested computers. I believe that amateur computing and computer science have displace EE and amateur science.
You can't get many supplies for the hobbyist lab anymore. Lawyers and politicians have made it too difficult.
"Sorry can't sell you that, could be used to make illegal drugs." or "Sorry we don't sell that; you could get hurt and sue us." and "We use to sell that but can't anymore, forbids it."
And let's not forget the ever-present terrorist threat. Anyone with chemicals in their household more elaborate than vinegar must be working with terrorists.
If I remember right, Jameco's online site only has a subset of their inventory. For maximum browsing enjoyment, get their dead-tree catalog.
Great company, highly recommended. I've ordered from them on and off since I was in high school, way back in the 70's. (That's back when people still played with electronics as a hobby, and Edmund Scientific had some of the coolest, most exotic stuff I'd ever seen.)
*DigiKey and Mouser are more focused on commercial users, but they're great sources for hard-to-find parts, or a specific variant of a part.
This is complete opposite of the article in Newsweek article I just read. The "welcome back to sillicon valley" issue. Which basically stated that the fall in the economy and the layoff of thousdand of workers in the tech field would allow many people with skills time to mess with current technology. They are predicting an increase in innovation like tech boom in the early to mid 90s. The interesting thing is that sure, there are less magazines dedicated to "tinkering" however I believe they have been replaced by various websites which are much cheaper to produce and maintain.
One example was the 802.11 wireless standard, how over the last few years what was considered junk bandwidth was embraced by radio hobbiests and made cheap by innovative manufacturing.
I believe that while the economy was good, everyone had a "look what I can get for free" mentality. Now that we've seen the downturn, I believe we see a more "What cool things can I do with the tech I already have" attitude.
I know presonally I've found myself doing that recently.
So to say DIY is dead, I believe it was hibernating, and it's about to wake back up for spring.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Did you even read the /. blurb, let alone the article? This is (part) about the fact that newer electronics components cannot be messed with by an amateur hobbyist because of their complexity. Somehow, I don't think of a COMMODORE 64 as a "newer electronics component".
Soldering irons will just barely work. Reliable work requires a hot-air soldering station, with a set of air guides for every shape of chip you're dealing with. And you probably have to take a soldering course to get your skills up to par.
Last year, I finally gave up hardware and boxed up the electronics tools and parts.
For some people, the construction of the equipment is the whole point. And while I'm sure some DIY hobbies are in decline, others have absolutely taken off in recent years.
I never got into building electronic stuff, but I'm interested in building guitars. Lately, I've been itching to build my own guitar amp. There is even a website devoted to it. Thanks to the numerous web resources out there, I can learn to build all sorts of crazy things that I never could have figured out on my own.
I suspect that the people that like soldering electronic gizmos together in their garage are still around, just doing different things. A surprising number of the amatuer guitar builders are techies, for instance. There's a whole lot of awesome stuff left to build, so I don't think that people are hanging up their soldering irons yet.
Steve
Your wrong about Mouser. I use them frequently and rarely need more than 2 or three parts. My average order price is probably about $10. Their entire catalog is available online too :)
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Now-a-days, macros are hived off to another area, and we're supposed to learn VirusBasic for Applications, and their woofy interface and use long commands like "CallApplicationFunctionInExcel()" in order to do any automation.
Basically, I just leave VBA for the script kiddies now. Never could make head nor tail of it.
On the other hand, leave me alone with some REXX and a ascii format, and since it's my baby, I understand it and make it do nice things.
Still, my hobbyist science is plowing into new world research :), so there's plenty of noonosphere to claim.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
BASIC on a chip with a few inputs and outputs.
I think they cost $10/each or $1 in quantities of a thousand.
This is hitting amateur radio hard. Most hams purchase their equipment these days; it's nearly impossible to obtain modern levels of performance on home built transceivers. (Well, that's a generalization; antennas are often homebuilt, and some diehards do build their own rigs.)
Why would people trade images with SSTV (slow scan TV, basically a codec for TV-resolution images sent over the radio) when they can email jpegs? For the most part, the people who do it are just in it for entertainment, not utility.
There is still room for tweaking; in fact, the amateur radio community strongly encourages it. Radios still usually come with complete schematics (pages and pages of schematics, in the case of some of the larger units in the local radio club's shack). But it's pretty uncommon to pull out the soldering iron these days and work on the actual equipment.
Better or worse? Neither. There will always be a small segment of the population that finds any given field (astronomy, radio, etc) exciting. New technology will just change their focus, but the interest is unlikely to go away.
-John, KG4RUO
See title.
We can build automated systems to search for comets, but we can't (yet :-) ) build a machine to replace the human creative element.
The real limit for the amateur is the ever growing body of knowledge and the complexity of the theories. At the present, to really understand how a semiconducting circuit works requires significant understanding of both physics and mathematics. Biology and astronomy are both taking a more mathematical bend now as well. I'm not saying that it's impossible for the home amateur to participate and contribute, but it's becoming more formidable.
On the positive side, the ease of access to journal articles has improved significantly (I think) so building a background in the literature not impossible.
The ability to automate complexity in order to make it simple to use over and over is the task of programming but the task of automating that process has been lacking.
...
It's not that we don't know what the collection of functionality needed is to make this possible on a broad scale, from typicaly users to hard core autocoders...
for a beginning point of autocoding See the nine action constants
This is a field really open for fresh blood as the old blood has to much vested interest in the way things are done and also to set in their ways.
Where autocoding can be found in industry is in areospace. Funny but you'd think it would be more kitchen table and evolve from there. Perhaps that suggest it's time to bring it to the kitchen table.
It's not that kitchen table scientist have slowed, but more a matter of what to explore and experiment with next, as it's clear alot has already been done to the point of cheap throwaway stuff what what we have had on the kitchen table in the not so distant past.
We just need new subject matter to deal with. Autocoding and user level automation is ready.
How about a do-it-yourself scanning tunnelling microscope? Or does that not qualify for some reason I don't understand?
> (Ever tried to fix surface mount components
> with a soldering iron at your kitchen table?
> Don't!!)
Why not?
I just soldered a couple of surface mount memory chips into my Tivo. Sure, the days of using a $12 Radio Shack soldering iron are long gone, but there are inexpensive Weller soldering irons that are well suited to todays ambitions hobiest.
Telling someone not to make that surface mount repair is adding to the very problem you are complaining about. Don't encourage people to be afraid to experiment and learn. You may not be able to make that repair, but that doesn't mean someone else can't.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
I agree. As has been mentioned on here in the past, the days of the garage shop startups like hewlett/packard is long gone. With all of the specialized hardware and test equipment required to develop anything of any signifigance it would be crazy to think someone would finance it on their own. Back in the day you might be able to produce a good wirewrap of a then high-speed circuit but what about now? A lot of items need to go straight from computer design to PCB to make sure noise is low, propagation delays are matched, etc...
My thinking is that the DIY people of this century will be working almost entirely in software. After all, the open source community is really just a community of DIYs.
I wince every time I see a Digikey price. Try www.meci.com too, they're underrated. They have some of the weird connectors that I can't get anywhere else unless I'm willing to buy qty 10,000 and wait 12 weeks lead time.
... just shifted to different areas.
The essential learning aspect of the hobbyist modality is captured pretty well by the LEGO Mindstorms robotics toys(?). While it's true that machine language is a lost art, as is the construction of simple electronic devices, there are new frontiers available today that were not practical in days gone by.
Maybe in another decade or two we'll have do-it-yourself genetic tinkering...
There are a number of packages for simulating chemicals/compounds/solids/liquids/etc. for semi-reasonable prices (certainly as cheap as a nice telescope). If one so desired, he could easily play around with simulations of materials all day. Curious about what tweaking a conducting polymer can do? Use VASP, TINKER, or some other first-principles code. It's computationally expensive, but with some patience alot can be done. Also, there are some free molecular dynamics packages (I believe) so you can actually simulate the movement of all kinds of things. One can see all kinds of neat behavior in things this way.
Its really a shame that hobby shops; for electronics and PC DIYers are so scarce in the US. Akihabara in Tokyo is a GEM for all sorts of amateur and professional Do-It-Yourselfers. Many of the large computer stores will have parts sections with a choice of over 20 different motherboards, and even more choices for all other types of hardware.
I don't know much about electronics, but I know you can get anything you need. There are even multiple stores selling vintage vacuum tubes.
Not so. My successes have been few, and weak... but I'm getting there. Surface mount isn't so tough to solder... it's designing the damn layout in the first place, and paying for a prototype pcb. Personally, I won't be satisfied until I'm capable of designing and building my own PCI card, even if it is some lame 16550 serial port or something.
I, like most of us here at /. , used to be an electronics enthusiast. I remember TAB books and books on crystal radios and so on.
/. than in any books.
/. but I would never have guessed that you could Stream RealAudio from a Commodore 64?!!!!!. I wouldn't even know such a thing could be done until stumbling across at /. and seeing some geek blazing trails that are SO far out to be unbelievable sometimes (like anything with a C64!) That's more original and trail blazing than any of the old "build your own radio set" projects.
I have however, see more interesting DIY here at
What is more DIY than building your own No click mouse or how about Mini PCs w/o fans?
Admittedly you won't see the actual plans hosted on
Anytime you wanna see DIY just go to the Hardware section.
It's right under your nose (which is under your CRT bloodshot eyes)
"Declining manufacturing costs now make it cheaper to buy a telescope, radio, or computer than to build one yourself."
It has always been cheaper to buy things like radios than to make them. Otherwise people would make them and sell them for less than the market price, and the market price would go down.
Cheaply available components that result from better manufacturing methods etc. allow children and hobbyists to perform more complex experiments and create more elaborate designs than was ever possible before.
If you get yourself a programmable logic developper's kit, you can design, with the same tools as professionals, anything from internet routers to microcomputers to cell phones and just abotu anything your heart desires, including specialized scientific analysis equipement.
try: http://www.latticesemi.com/
They also provide an analog version. wiring a digital and an analog programmable device together gives you the flexibility to design just about any sub-100 Mhz device out there. Heck I'm sure you could procure some old schematics for ancient CPU's and actaully make them yourself.
For instance, at one point, we had a vacuum cleaner (from elextrolux) from around 1978. That thing worked great until the mid-90's (when some of the electronics went bad). I was able to repair the switch (with a replacement), but, if I was unable to do so, the repair costs would have been ~US$250. To buy a new vacuum cleaner would run ~US$150 (I think). With these new ones, they are really complex (comparitivly speaking) than the old ones (and harder to open).
So, the whole problem here is, do you try to fix, or just replace. This probably doesn't make much sence, but, I hope that my point is at least somewhat comprehended.
-CPM
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
I still have one of the last Heath kit TVs from about ten to twelves years ago. Made it with my dad back then, didn't understand what the hell what he was doing, but that was fun. I still use it all the time, the picture's not so great, and it's pretty small (9" screen). But, I guess I have some attachment to the little bugger. Cool thing indeed.
I have had a hunch that it was slowing. I mean you can still do all the electronic tinkering you want. What I think is lacking is new Tools. I mean everyone has power supplies,oscilliscopes,DMM, and components. But I think what are also needed is some sort of Numerical Control for soldering VLSI/ULSI componenets onto boards, something that is impossible with a soldiering iron. That one tool If done cheaply and inexpensively could produce the break through to Electronic Hobbyist using DSP's, and uProcossors above the 6811 and Z80's. What could come after that?? Photo/chemical deposition of new circuits to buid new devices in your garage??? That would help as well. But if Amatuer engineering is on the decline than we in 5-7 years will see a massive shortage of electrical engineers at least from America. I don't know any EE today that wasn't into electronics as a hobby before they actually got their degree. Perhas it will be Robotics (not actual robots but just their industrial/numerical control counterparts) that will jump the gap and put modern technology back into the realm of the hobbyist?? Just my .02c
Ben
Now how can you honestly say D.I.Y. is dead when young boy scouts are still doing things like this for their badges =)
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/n1782_v297
(on a serious note, I agree with the article - and it's a very sad trend to see happen)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Can I, as an amateur computer scientist, claim a tax deduction on the "computer lab" I've set up in my apartment? That would be sweet. I use it to fascilitate my research into the storage and retrieval of vast amounts of porn... err ...I mean archival image files.
Kind of ironic that SciAm is wailing about the demise of the hobbyist magazine - they themselves used to be one of the pre-eminent tinkerer's magazines before a change in ownership in 1948
It's fairly natural to see any particular field go from producing information exchanges (and prior to the 'net, this pretty mich mean magazines) adressing the nuts and bolts of pursuing the field to producing information exchnages which largely address the contemporary problems to which the field is being applied.
Ever since that halfwit in the US patent office said "there's nothing left to be invented" at the turn of the century people have said that there was no longer a role for garage engineering in the advancement of technology. As we've seen repeatedly since, there are always new fields which depend for key bursts of work on people who use too much speed and can't find the key to the garage door. The only thing that's changed in recent years is the switch to the internet as a forum for trading ideas and techniques, hence the apparent dissappearance of the qunitisential tinkerer's magazine.
How many of us were at one time EE hackers? I know this is how I got started as a youth. The problem is, back then a batch of TTL logic gates could actually yield a neat cutting-edge device. Now, however, newer construction technologies -- SMT, BGA (especially BGA) are making it impossible for the hobbiest EE to use their home-made PCBs to make anything.
BGAs, for those of you who don't know, are evil little packages for ICs which just have little bumps on the bottom. You line them up with the pads on the PCB and then heat the entire thing in an oven to solder. This results in even higher-density components -- great for your cell phone, but impossible to do with your home equipment. To check alignment you need a special x-ray machine!!!
Perhaps it may be the packaging that does away with hobbiest EE...
I think the real reason is that it's hard to get specs for new products, especially for electronic products. With all the patents, NDAs, and other paranoia for protecting intellectual property, it's harder for someone to do this kind of hobby, it would cost you more money (you probably need to pay royalties) or spend more time (you might have to restort reverse-engineering to get the specs).
We consumers should fully support companies who release their specs openly and encourage others to be open as it hinders progress.
Looks like a great collection. Young kids still need to start somewhere. They don't call it 'catching', they call it 'fishing'. All the fun is getting there!
What you're suggesting is that there will never again be another electronics company, and that we'll have to live with the giants we have now (that and startups out of college by rich peoples kids). While probably true, I have a hard time accepting that some entrepreneuring individual working out of a garage couldn't revolutionize the world once again.
A solution to the problem with music today
It's hard to tinker these days sinec corporations are blindly shifting their goals to producing "solutions" rather than "parts". We've taken a step back to the 1800's, in that everything produced is fundamentally incompatible with everything else produced. The difference being that in the 1800s, things weren't compatible because they couldn't be easily replicated. Even "parts" companies are trying to stop building parts and figure out how to sell unique part conglomerates to suit specific identified needs. Talk to your local market rep, they'll sell you shit targetting at the "x market" or the "y market". Ever try to get support for something new? Damn near impossible without a bank statement asserting you have $15million, ready to spend.
Now it's just because company x doesn't want company y getting any of their business.
but given how they are now so cheap with the economy in a downturn, buying a couple turned out to be a better deal.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Oh please. I build stuff all the time at home and in the lab, last time I checked, places like Maxim have -free- sample quantities in packages you can work with if you have a good iron (SOIC, et al). Getting boards done in small volume is cheap, use a tool like Eagle, which is even available for Linux (but not OS X, doh!). Spend a few bucks and get a quality board done at a internet based low volume PCB shop.
There are evil packages, but the truth is a lot of the prototyping and test work is done on hand placed boards. Even evil packages can be used if you get an adapter board, there are a few of them out there.
What's more telling is that now instead of messing with token things, and "wow, I actually got something to show up on the display", you can do some real work with your computer and designs and instruments. I realized awhile ago I was spending far too much of my time tinkering with things and not enough accomplishing things.. but I guess some of that is the Linux mentality too. :) Now I figure out what I want to accomplish and use the best tool, rather than attempting to make everything into a nail for my hammer.
For $300 or so you can even get prototype boards for FPGAs if you want to do custom hardware. $150 will get you a decent micro development system, and AVRGCC is gnu, runs on linux and windows (but not OS X :), and lets you program cheap cheap cheap AVRs to do just about anything you want. Mix with ADCs and some transistor fed relays or PWM control to do whatever. You can get software to turn your PC into a function generator to test, or if you hunt around, you can get a nice old digital oscilloscope AND a real function generator AND a bus analyser suitable for 8 bit micros (or more) for less than the cost of a PC 4 years ago.
Same thing applies for most other scientific equipment. Be careful when sourcing chemistry gear, even broken stuff, or you might have the DEA paying you a little visit if you happen to live in the USA. If high voltage fun is your bag, there's companies for that. There are even companies that sell cold fusion experiment kits - although most of the magic there seems to be in the process used to create the electrodes.
I contend there's never been a better time to BE a amateur scientist! You can actually afford to have a decent lab since last year's gear can be tracked down on the cheap.. and accomplish real work, too! How many high res night shots could you store on a $200 80gb drive? Etc, etc, etc, etc.
Death of amateur science predicted! Film at 11.
..don't panic
D.I.Y. isn't dead. It just moved to OpenCores, and other sites like it. Come along and give us a hand!
I'd have to say, no.
Unless one of the parts is an unpopulated motherboard PCB. You probably won't be breadboarding together the high speed busses/signals, the electrical tolerances are just too strict. Plus most of the parts are surface mount, BGAs and the like. You'd have to buy sockets for everything (which cost big bucks). Now, I don't want to say it's impossible, but..
Actually, without getting the density achieved by using a custom PCB, it might be physically impossible to route all the connections and adhere to all the tolerances using off the shelf solutions.
FYI, I'm a software guy, but the company I work for builds/manufactures motherboards. Even with the reference design straight from Intel, it's still hard work and can take 2 EEs up to a year*. That's also with access to nice (expensive) test equipment and a lab.
* Actually, I don't know how long it would take to do a "normal" motherboard. Ours are small compared to a typical motherboard (they're actually PICMG SBCs) and they have integrated components (SCSI, video, Ethernet, etc) and a custom BIOS. So that makes our design more time consuming.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
We're not all building Ham radios and grinding our own telescope lenses, but that's because we're so busy building our own aparatus for whatever interests us using the building blocks of the digital generation. 90% of my projects have nearly nothing to do with pre-1970's devices.
And when something DOES?-- well, ten seconds after I got my first Dobsonian 'scope, I began thinking how cool it'd be to rig it up with photocells, servos, a database and a real-time webserver so I could stargaze last night's sky any time I wanted (like at lunch!?). And two-thirds of how I'd do that isn't available from Edmunds. What's more, ten more seconds of searching on google (webcam astronomer) got me two such devices already implemented.
Folks are building their own fuel cells and hooking 'em to bikes, making wireless network antennas, turbocharged generators, stereo-to-PC integration devices, in-car-computers, personal VTOL aircraft, and more!
We're all still experimenting. That's what hacking is, in my book. We're just caught up in 'new' areas of discovery.
Oh, and Open Source has little to do with the urge to experiment. They may coincide, but either can live just fine exclusively of one another.
Adult "born again rocketeers" are building larger, faster, and more powerful rockets -- and the kids are following suit.
In all these cases, we've taken the manufacturing boom and used it to support our hobbies. It's not the same as tinkering with low-level parts and raw materials, but in the end you still learn a whole lot about physics, materials science, electronics, etc.
My DIY experience has greatly *increased* with all the new trends and technologies (and cheaper old ones). I mean.. 10 years ago, could you buy a perfectly good 100Mhz. storage oscilloscope in an online auction for $100? Or instantly access spec sheets on just about any IC ever produced? Or discuss circuit design technique on public mailing lists with electrical engineers around the world?
DIY isn't going away.. it's getting more advanced and more exciting! (and yes, SMD soldering is very muchpractical for the home hobbyist with about $50 of the right tools)
You can build a telescope mostly from parts you find at a dumpster: some pieces of wood for the base, a cardboard tube, a piece of glass... Take a look at the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers' website, for example.
People have made high-quality optical paraboloidal mirrors from scrap glass, glass candle holders, trepanned discs cut from CRT-tubes, etcetera. I have ground and polished a 7" glass disc into a shape which surface deviates no more than 40 nanometer from an ideal paraboloid. All this takes is a lot of time and patience, and some basic materials. Remember: the first telescopes were built 300 years ago.
The Amateur Telescope Making community is very much alive, try a google query with these words.
If you're interested in building a telescope, optionally including grinding and polishing your own optics, join the Amateur Telescope Makers mailing list.
I studied for and worked in the mechanically precise environment of 35mm film editing for ten years. When I began most of the equipment I worked with was from the 50s. Presently, it is being replaced almost completely by digital work environments. It leaves something to be desired when You come from the smokey backrooms of yore in Hollywood. Current profesional standard editing software is awkwardl;y super imposed on the editing process, making some important processes invisible to the observer. Read= unnecessarily protective of intellectual property = pay for education = tricky= Read =taxing the intelectual capacities of assistant editors with solitary double work and constant detailed user interface changes are not necessary . I took a year off and invested myself in tinkering with my DP G4 andnow OS X. I created a digital film editing environment allowing the tech to work ergonomically within the process. Integrating a new technology and restoring an old fashioned environment. Open source code is the spine of this becoing a reality. I think its up to all of the professionals who tinker out there to apply technology to the environment gently as a networked community of professionals. As a professional I see the great teachers of an era handicapped by tech integration issues. Many film budgets only include tech support from the hardware back. Filmmaking includes international, multi format and multi-national nightmares. Its a great opportunity for international networked communitiesto apply tech inteligently. By metaphor, I have chosen a challenge for this process of integration, a theme for the next phase of technological intergration that will include software writing. The rebuilding of a Norton Commando 750, with half a whitworth tool set. If the frustration of that physical tinkering doesnt work out the kinks in the software design process, I dont know what would. tinkering at work, ja
Maybe not exactly amateur science, but DIY is certainly alive and well on the Internet. There are hundreds of websites and mailing lists where people show off and discuss their projects.
Surface mounts components aren't that hard to work with either, you just need to learn new techniques. Also you don't have to drill all those holes...
But most, if not all, the activity has actually moved somewhere else: The Net. I can pop open a browser and buy radio parts over the web that no big-city electronics store ever stocked, even in the heday of the 50's and 60's. I can go to a usenet group and read sci.electronics.design or go one of literally millions of hobbyist websites where folks are absolutely doing their own thing, completely unfettered by the publishing industry.
About a DIY operating system, but I'm danged if I can remember what it was called.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
I think over the last three decades amateur pastimes in general have suffered due to television and video games. I won't blame the internet because I think it has actually made things like amateur science stronger.
I think this is a wonderful time to be an amateur scientist. If you look over those good old days articles you see lots of dangerous setups, or lots or work for little reward. Do you want to build an adder out a relays? You shouldn't...IMHO. With things like cheap microcontrollers with free development systems it has become really easy to do things which would have been very difficult a few years ago. Curious about a local pond?...Make a little battery operated device to record water temperature, set it up for a 24 hour period, take the device home and download the data. Curious what's what the bottom of that pond looks like and don't like to get all wet?...make yourself an underwater case for a cheap video camera. CCD cameras are really cheap these days. What's the point? It can be fun and educational. Besides many a discovery has been made investigating things nobody thought was worth investigating.
You computer nerds might want to investigate the world of cellular automata. Little is known about CA's, but a little programming, a little math, lots of watching, and a whole lot of thinking might make you famous...among nerds.
Whatever you do, don't waste you entire evening watching TV. No, not even the discovery channel.
I think there is another things going on here. It's not hip. People will spend money to be hip. People will buy a $2000 bike because it makes them feel young and fit. It will end up collecting dust in the cellar, but somebody made good money selling the bike. It is harder to sell a mirror grinding kit.
Gotta go...Antiques Roadshow is on!
Not even that - we just focus on building different equipment.
Maybe there's no longer the huge boom of electronics magazines, but there's still quite a few left. Everyday Practical Electronics is a good magazine for beginner and intermediate-level hobbyists, and contains many useful circuits.
The place where amateurs can't do much is in anything using low-power components. Radios, computers etc are all long-gone. But anything involving power components is still well within the reach of hobbyists. Hi-fi amps, power supplies etc can all be built more cheaply to a higher quality than commercial equipment. The simple reason is that if it's high-power, the components can't be miniaturised like low-power ones.
The other place where hobbyist stuff scores is on anything esoteric. You want an automatic plant-waterer, or a touch-panel light switch, or anything out-of-the-ordinary which you can't easily buy off the shelf, you can build it yourself.
It's very like software, really. A few large organisations (MS, the Linux kernel group, Gnome, KDE) have put lots of time into developing operating systems, window managers, utilities and office programs, so a lone individual can't hope to compete with that work on their own. But if the lone individual spots an application which hasn't yet been written, they can still crank that out and make it a success.
I honestly don't think there's that much actual research can be done by hobbyists. The main problem is that there's too many patents around, so you can unintentionally be infringing a zillion patents with your obvious ideas. The fact that the patents are garbage is neither here nor there when the lawyers come down on you.
Graham.
I make my own PCBs for electronics projects I build myself. And I do go straight from design to PCB, bcos I don't often make serious mistakes in the design and the errors I do make can be fixed with patch wires. If you have your own PCB-making kit (total price around £100) then it's much easier to do that than to mess around with wire-wrap and matrix-board, especially for large circuits.
And what I work on is stuff which doesn't much exist elsewhere, or is outrageously expensive elsewhere. My current project is a universal chip programmer. To buy a 40-pin chip programmer costs minimum £250 - I reckon I can put one together for around £80-100 that'll perform better than even the high-end (£400) programmers. Not bad, eh?
If the companies producing gadgets aren't churning out like a few thousand a week, then the chances are that the drop in cost from them buying in bulk is more than offset by the cost of labour to make the gadget and the profit added on. If a hobbyist doesn't consider their time to be a cost in the project and only counts money spent on parts, there's still plenty you can do yourself for cheaper than buying it.
Graham.
I used to remove and replace surface mount chip caps., resisters, transisters using 2 weller 60 watt soldering irons (grounded tip models). Worked quit well for me.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
It is still cheaper to build your own telescope than it is to buy one. It is just with the availability of relatively cheap, high-quality, commercial telescopes, the incentive is not there as much as it used to be.
It used to be, twenty years ago if you wanted to buy a telescope much larger than 12 inches, your options were limited. Now you can buy a 30 inch telescope if you so choose to.
Write a driver for your device (based on the USB ID) for whatever OS you use, and roll on. You get true plug and play, don't run out of space, can power small projects directly off the USB, etc.
So.. forget PCI. Go for USB. I don't remember the URL (typical) but there is a website with a full tutorial about building a USB device, step by step, including diagrams and sourcecode.
... because of "Anonymous Coward"... but:
Hobby tinkering is not dead, it is just moving to the next level. Look at that silly movie "The Fast and the Furious". The old Detroit muscle cars are dead, kids nowadays are souping up Honda Civics. So? The technology that is being adapted and the modifications that are being made are appropriate for the current technology.
Similarly with electronics. There is no point in building a computer any more because they became too advanced. Ditto radios and other electronic doodads. But look at what people are doing *with* the computers! Did you notice the internet and all the wild and wonderful applications people have dreamed up for it, and all the strange and innovative stuff that's being done with computer generated 3D graphics and audio?
Twenty years from now we, yes we the hip and cool young people will be the old farts with their obsolete Linux boxes in the basement and their weird personal web pages and stuff. It will be so uncool and yesterday, like model railroads and radio control planes and ham radio today (uh oh, I feel the heat already).
Live with it. Creative nerds will always find something to do. Maybe twenty years from now there will be amateur genetic engineering (I hope not).
Others may have died, but me not! Look atg ht/r onja. I think this is worth of tinkering - I have :-)
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibri
built myself two of them and they perform the best
and most reliably of all wireless devices I have ever seen
With the loss of the Amateur Scientist column along with Connections (my two favorites), I find little left in the magazine (excluding the usual hand-waving fluff) to keep me coming back. I let my subscription lapse 6 months ago; every once in a while, I'll browse the monthly copy at the local B&N, but I have yet to find a compelling reason to buy.
Meanwhile my home-built gravimeter sits quietly on the shelf, recording local feline Tachyon emissions...
Yeah, right.
SciAm's behaivor was completely uncalled for. Mims is a very credible source for electronic's hobbiests. His pencil drawn handbooks contain technical writing that is as clear and succinct as I've ever seen.
I would not take Mims seriously speaking as a creationist or Intelligent Designer or whatever they are going to call it next week. However, I take him very very seriously when it comes to electronics. Fair is fair, and there is nothing inappropriate about recognizing his electronics competence.
SciAm tarnished themselves by not recognizing this and gave creationists one hell of a talking point. Shame on them.
There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it.
Riiiight......
This dude is aparantly a chemistry mad geek with a thing for explosions, but doesn't know the properties of red phosphorus!
Someone is yanking your chain :-)
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Generally science at home lacks the budget of the professionals. Some of the amateur astronomy set ups I have seen are ingenious. And the low cost of olde technology as it is dumped means the amateur scientist has a wide range of entry level options.
I would guess that many tinkerers now do it with software rather than hardware.
I also don't see the DIY movement as completely dead - how many people out there have built their own computer and/or overclocked it? That isn't much different than what Heathkit did -- give you a schematic and some parts and let you put it together. After you got done, you'd mess with what you had to make it better.
I have a robot I built in an Electronics class in the '80s that had some serious modding done on it, mainly in mechanical areas. Speaking of robots, what about Battle Bots?
Having built my own 8" dob, I saved maybe 50 bucks over buying an Orion 8" if you discount the cost of my (and my father's) labor.
I did hit the target I was aiming for (a basic, usable scope) but it was also plagued with problems caused by my own inexperience.
If I already had a full wood working shop, and had the skills to use it, I suppose I could build something to compete with the Obsessions and Star Splitters and save several hundred off a two thousand dollar scope. But I don't, and the cost of the tools and skills would more than offset any savings.
Clear, Dark Skies
Yeah, Sci Am has slowly turned into Omni magazine. In college, I would read it knowing full well I'd only understand one article in 5 and hoping that the other 4 would rub off.
I've either become a lot smarter, or Sci Am has gotten a lot dumber. I'm assuming the latter.
Clear, Dark Skies
For instance, I am currently in the design phases of making a hydrogen generator based on electrolisys, so I don't have to buy oxy for a cutting torch, and get the hydrogen to boot ;)
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Actually, dedicated scope builders often do grind their own lenses.
Personally, I don't have the patience.
Clear, Dark Skies
Tons of creative tinkering, including in electronics, is happening these days in the build-it-yourself airplane movement. KitPlanes magazine has a column most months on how to assemble your own avionics circuits.
This is a little off-topic, but I see it at least once a week on /.. "THEN" denotes a timeline or cause and effect. "THAN" is used for comparison. As in science-is-for-more-THAN-scientists.
This is probably what you vaguely remember. They are unspeakably cool, aren't they?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Not just science, but DIY in general. I have a friend who is building a new house. He can only build his own house because he is a carpenter, it is illegal for me to build a house (in that or most other) neighborhood. He cannot do his own plumbing. Water, it runs downhill unless under pressure. If you can soder electric you can soder pipes, and drain pipes are even easier. Nope, cannot touch it. He can do his own wiring, but I'm not allowed to help him. Low voltage 110 (US), but I can touch it. We aren't talking tesla coil voltages here, and I've survived enough electric shocks to know that it is not a big deal (though unpleasent). Can't do it.
When kids grow up seeing their parents not doing anything themselves, they learn not to do anything themself. I grew up watching dad replace the power steering cycelenders (not sure what they care called) on his car, and I wouldn't consider not doing that myself. I grew up watching dad fix TVs, and I expect to do the same.
What an idiot. We have just largely stopped using magazines in light of the Internet.
I've learned almost everything I know about electronics from the Internet.
Look at these books! Look at them! All Free, as in Liberty AND No-Cost. These are some of the very best books I have found on electronics, on-line or off. Forest Mims the Third, eat your heart out.
Do we want to talk about mentoring and serendipity?
There you go.
If anything, I'd say that amateur science and learning and construction is more popular now, because it is more accessible.
It just doesn't take the form of magazine articles.
It helps set the stage for banning computers that do not have copy protection (DMCA / CBDTPA)
You can build your own, cheap parts can be sourced and what you can do with them is getting even better.
It is getting harder to repair comercial products, that is true. It is also even more motivation to build your own.
Build a computer in an FPGA
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Please write to Scientific American, without the Amateur Scientist colum I doubt I would have come up with any ideas for school science projects. Even more important then the projects themselves the Amateur Scientist articles planted the idea in my head that I could be a scientist. That discovery and invention could be accomplished by anyone.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
Will you be making your PCB designs and software available, by chance?
You should be glad that Fry's still sells what limited variety of electronics components it does.
Electronics supplies availability are very soon going to become extremely limited due to the war on terrorism since terrorists might be buying parts there.
Hey, moron, did you read my post?
/. pretty lame.
Newer components HAVE been messed with because the Commodore 1 is made in FPGAs. She even made her own PC board.
And I said it was an 'EXTENDED' Commodore 64. So it's newer.
The fact is, she took an existing chipset that has very little documentation (I mean C= is RIP), and added all kinds of power to it.
Even a 20 year old computer like the C64, is pretty complex when you get down to the gate level. Of course, you probably think it's all easy, right? Skript k1dd13???
It's people like you that make
Just like Slashdot itself! Genius!
...to the amateur scientist/tinkerer/hobbiest.
First of all, the war on drugs has put an absolute end to the amateur chemist. Anybody with a test tube in their possesion is a suspected meth manufacturer. Next, since electronics devices are used by terrorists, this hobby soon will disappear and you will no longer be able to buy such parts and supplies. Also consider that the tree-huggers have also declared war on electronics. Solder has lead in it and is already been officially deemed a hazardous material. You can't even buy mercury anymore to make your own mercury switches. Possession of mercury by an unlicensed person is actually a crime (misdemeanor) in my state, punishable by jail, fine or both. The tree huggers have also successfully eliminated spray cans of contact and control cleaner. Try to buy a can of Lube-a-Trol or Blue Shower anymore? The manufacturer of those has all but been been forced out of business, they only sell to commercial accounts anymore. Did you ever enjoy making your own printed circuit boards? Kodak photo-resist is no longer available to individuals anymore, you have to be licensed and prove that you have an approved manufacturing facility with approved hazardous materials storage capability before you can even posess it here. Ferric chloride to etch the boards? Ha! Again with the several-hundred-thousand dollar facility, PLUS you are required by state law here to document and log all your purchase, use, and disposal (using a state-approved disposal company) of etching solution here. Every year you are required to turn in your paperwork to the state environmental agency. Nothing in the world of electronics manufactoring is able to escape the "Greenie" luddites' scrutiny.
Along with the "War on Everything" and making criminals out of all scientific hobbiests, compounded by the assaults of the environmentalists, lastly we have the commercial forces at work to drive the nail into the coffin of the individual scientific hobbiest. The manufacturing giants want (for both greed and control of intellectual property) to make it impossible for you to "do-it-yourself" in any way shape form or fashion. Their goal is that anything and everything shall only be made by them and SOLD to you. They are doing everything in their ability to make sure that you cannot tinker with manufactured items they sell to you either. My gawd, man, they're evey freakin' telling you how you can and can't use what you buy from them. It's really THAT BAD. You have to have been a rip van winkle asleep to not have noticed that trend.
It is now dawning the day where in order to work with anything technical, you will ONLY be permitted to do so if you pass thru all the formal passages of college, pass extreme scrutiny of the government and other cerrtifying authorities and work for a research or manufacturing giant, and then you will only work on the specific things that you are allowed to in that work environment. The small guy is over. End. Finito. Hell, soon you won't even be permitted to write your own software else you'll be branded as a cyberterrorist.
{{{
I submit that it is not amateur scientists that are in decline, but Scientific American.
}}}
Well said. In tha last few years we've seen all kinds of hobby science being done. Sure old fields may have dried up, but new fields have opened.
e.g. Look at the microwave plasma ball experiments which were impossible 20 years ago (I think that I first read about these about 10 years ago, the recent story on slashdot was very behind the times).
Nowadays the raw components of hobby hacking may be pre-built processors, DSPs, RF units (naughty, naughty) etc., but that doesn't detract from their innovativeness.
20 years ago people weren't rolling their own capacitors, for heaven's sake, so why should we expect modern day tinkerers to not take advantage of what are now commodity items?
YAWIAR.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
I don't know any EE today that wasn't into electronics as a hobby before they actually got their degree.
How old are these EE's? I'm a 28-year-old EE, and I'm the only EE I know who was into electronics before getting his degree (and still is a little). In fact, I'm the only EE I know who has any technical hobbies whatsoever (electronics, auto mechanics, OSS programming, Linux, etc.). And I work at a certain really huge processor manufacturer, where I'm surrounded by EE's (though none of them are over ~33).
Trust me, for most engineers, engineering is just a way to make money, not something they do out of any huge interest in electronics. And if you're really interested in electronics and are considering getting into electrical engineering, don't. You'll be severely disappointed. I was.
Much of what I want to build, are actually SLDC network cards. ISA or PCI are the only logical choices. PCI is, really. USB is nice, don't get me wrong, and many of the "peripheal" things I want to build will be USB instead of ieee1284, but some things are best as expansion cards.
My HS library had a copy of that book... and even then I was surprised. Then again, that library saw less action than the Hellmouth library in Buffy, so they probably figured that leaving it on the shelves was the best way to ensure a student would never stumble upon it.
Still, I would be surprised if the book is still on the shelves today, over 20 years later.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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This is very much the case in the programming crowd I deal with too.
I was a biology major, but ended up doing programming because I had been doing it since I could get my hands on a computer (they used to be -really- expensive).
These days, most programmers I meet are only in it because it was the best-paying option when they chose their majors.
Not saying that my experience applies to programmers in general (in fact, open source programming seems to fly in the face of this) - but out here in corporate-land, it's all about the cash, it seems.
Pity, no?
Im an ex prototype solderer, as part of my job I used to spend days hand soldering surface mount components on PCBs. It was a crackpot company and they didn't want to pay to have them machine done. I must say I tend to agree with the original poster's advice. Don't. I can't see these days.
Sorry, but you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. The parent comment was on how much SciAm sucks now, not on commidity blah blah balh. You lose. Thanks for trying.
ditto. I felt that during most of my studies, and it s very disapointing to see how this non-motivated majority actually defines the standard: one even looks suspicious for liking what he studies, it s seen as a lack of pragmatism, or some kind of nevrosis even by professors.
....)
That s the way it goes in France at least , and that s were I studied (semiconductor physics) engineering. I found a way out in The Netherlands : engineering is here so poorly regarded as a carreer ( I make under 70k$ gross yearly, but then again my rent is 220$ including heat+elec.+cableTV...), in comparison with lawyer or even commercial rep. that I find myself surrounded only motivated engineers and doctors at work. And that is worth more than truckloads of money or social recognition. The word for geek here is "techneut" and I guess it s even more depreciative than in the US.
Another difference is that the company is far from huge, thus i can tinker with any activities I like ( analog / digital / RF / high speed logic / compact models / physical design / EDA support and library development
See my company's web site, FPGA CPU News: http://fpgacpu.org/
. pdf
/ soc-gr0040-paper.pdf
and my articles: "Building a RISC System in an FPGA":
http://fpgacpu.org/xsoc/cc.html and
http://fpgacpu.org/papers/xsoc-series-drafts
and (simpler): "Designing a Simple FPGA-Optimized RISC CPU and System-on-a-Chip":
http://www.fpgacpu.org/papers
and links: http://www.fpgacpu.org/links.html
...to the amateur scientist/tinkerer/hobbiest.
First of all, the war on drugs has put an absolute end to the amateur chemist. Anybody with a test tube in their possesion is a suspected meth manufacturer. Next, since electronics devices are used by terrorists, this hobby soon will disappear and you will no longer be able to buy such parts and supplies. Also consider that the tree-huggers have also declared war on electronics. Solder has lead in it and is already been officially deemed a hazardous material. You can't even buy mercury anymore to make your own mercury switches. Possession of mercury by an unlicensed person is actually a crime (misdemeanor) in my state, punishable by jail, fine or both. The tree huggers have also successfully eliminated spray cans of contact and control cleaner. Try to buy a can of Lube-a-Trol or Blue Shower anymore? The manufacturer of those has all but been been forced out of business, they only sell to commercial accounts anymore. Did you ever enjoy making your own printed circuit boards? Kodak photo-resist is no longer available to individuals anymore, you have to be licensed and prove that you have an approved manufacturing facility with approved hazardous materials storage capability before you can even posess it here. Ferric chloride to etch the boards? Ha! Again with the several-hundred-thousand dollar facility, PLUS you are required by state law here to document and log all your purchase, use, and disposal (using a state-approved disposal company) of etching solution here. Every year you are required to turn in your paperwork to the state environmental agency. Nothing in the world of electronics manufactoring is able to escape the "Greenie" luddites' scrutiny.
Along with the "War on Everything" and making criminals out of all scientific hobbiests, compounded by the assaults of the environmentalists, lastly we have the commercial forces at work to drive the nail into the coffin of the individual scientific hobbiest. The manufacturing giants want (for both greed and control of intellectual property) to make it impossible for you to "do-it-yourself" in any way shape form or fashion. Their goal is that anything and everything shall only be made by them and SOLD to you. They are doing everything in their ability to make sure that you cannot tinker with manufactured items they sell to you either. My gawd, man, they're evey freakin' telling you how you can and can't use what you buy from them. It's really THAT BAD. You have to have been a rip van winkle asleep to not have noticed that trend.
It is now dawning the day where in order to work with anything technical, you will ONLY be permitted to do so if you pass thru all the formal passages of college, pass extreme scrutiny of the government and other cerrtifying authorities and work for a research or manufacturing giant, and then you will only work on the specific things that you are allowed to in that work environment. The small guy is over. End. Finito. Hell, soon you won't even be permitted to write your own software else you'll be branded as a cyberterrorist
When my dad was stationed in West Germany going to school in the Army for Radar his class was tought by a English speaking German Physicist. And the mindset was not about money but about knowledge. I guess it has changed but I am unable to change to that. I Love knowing something to nth degree. Precision and Mastery are the Holy Grail of Engineering depth of knowledge helps.
I became an EE because I was the only one in my family who was interested in electronics. I had no one to turn to help me out and I was giving little direction when I was a kid. "You want to play with electronics? Try fixing the VCR." I decided college was my best bet.
Now, college didn't help me out too much either. Sure I learned theory, but I played with electronics very little. Which disappointment me greatly. But at least at work, with the project I somehow landed in, I am able to play around with electronics. I am designing some quick little vector boards to help with a prototype design.
It's a little late, but I thought I would throw in my thoughts on the matter. I think I happened to luck into everything, and now I have the confidence and knowledge to play around. I would love to help others out to learn the basics of electronics and so everyone can just start playing around. I find learning that way to be much more fun!
I have taken a subrscription to Scientific American in that Past. It was a good magazine way above omni. I read on off the shelf at work several months ago and it was still informative. But one day many years ago I picked up a copy of the American Journel of Physics and it was then that I understood although Sci Am is good it is Still just a Laymans magazine. I couldn't even touch the Articles in AJoP. What is the equivalent Journal for Electrical and Mechanical Engineers?? I don't know. Ben
Also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10374&cid=4519 43:
"I build processors in FPGAs, perhaps you can too
It's more accessible than some of the other responses would lead you to believe. The tools are quite good, and the devices themselves project a simple synchronous digital world abstraction.
Excellent basic synthesis and FPGA implementation tools are now $0-$55, several proto boards are $100-$200, the devices themselves are $20, and with them you can build 16- and 32-bit processors that run at 33-67 MHz and beyond. Perfect for many embedded systems projects.
Visit our web site, FPGA CPU News [www.fpgacpu.org] for further information. And/or join the mailing list [www.yahoogroups.com/group/fpga-cpu].
See my Circuit Cellar magazine article series, "Building a RISC CPU and a System-on-a-Chip in an FPGA" [www.fpgacpu.org/xsoc/cc.html]. The corresponding free kit (which requires a $100 FPGA proto board from another company) is at [www.fpgacpu.org/xsoc/index.html].
Or see my recent DesignCon'2001 paper on "Building a Simple FPGA-Optimized RISC Processor and System-on-a-Chip" [www.fpgacpu.org/soc-gr0040-001201.pdf]. This latter paper includes the annotated synthesizable Verilog source code of a simple CPU -- less than 200 lines of code.
Learning to design digital systems with a hardware description language, and then progressing to design your own peripherals, and perhaps processors, is not a trivial undertaking, but neither is it anymore an exclusive and unobtainable art, practiced only by high priests in well funded semiconductor companies with in house fabs."
For that maybe how you tell professional from amateur science: amateur needs gizmos to keep him busy; whereas professional has enough open issues to solve on paper, and he ll use the ready made gizmos only when a confrontation with measurements is required.
Or maybe there is no such thing as professional VS amateur science, just like there is valid distinction between professional and amateur programming, or between professional and amateur music playing ?
It s neither better or worse, it s just paid. Do you prefer amateur or professional love ?
...they're quiet, so quiet. I've never been able to build a box as quiet as the ones you get from Dell or the other places (but especially Dell, it seems). At home, I have to shut my computer off at night 'cause of the noise. If I had me one o' them Dells, I could leave it up 24x7.
.sig intentionally left blank.
--
This
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I know what you mean. The people you are talking about are not really engineers deep down in their souls.
There were very few people in the EE classes I went to that seemed to want to learn. They just wanted to get grades so they could get a degree so they could get a job. And many of them HATED lab classes as much or even more than they hated the theoretical classes. Wrong major, if you ask me.
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Yeah, this is exactly what I saw in most of my engineering classes too.
I actually have a few more comments to make though:
When I worked at a University research organization, there were only a few engineers there, but they were ALL really into personal projects, DIY stuff, etc. Very practical, hands-on people. I kinda regret leaving that place. However, only one was a BSEE; another was a BSME, another a EE major (still a student), and one had a CS degree. I think I've seen more CS people who were good at hardware than EE's.
Also, I went to two different universities: Univ. of Tennessee in Knoxville, and Virginia Tech. VT has by far a better reputation among employers, but when I went there, the students were all just there to get a job, not because they had any interest in electronics. None of them even knew how to solder. But when I went to UTK (my freshman and sophomore years), many more students there were into hobbyist stuff. Almost everyone had an HP48 calculator. And the courses encouraged hands-on work more; we had to solder projects together in early junior-level classes, and had to program assembly language (on real 486's) in a sophomore class.
So there's a few "real EE's" out there, but if you're a "real EE", finding a job that suits you seems to be nearly impossible. If anyone has any pointers, please speak up!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I collect automobilia, and part of that collection includes magazines like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Science and Mechanics from the 50s and 60s. They're full of DIY projects in electronics, carpentry, boating/fishing/hunting, 'handy hints' and pop-science and handyman things in general. Apart from Popular Science, these magazines don't exist anymore, and nowhere do I see replacements in the magazine racks. Instead, today's kids have TV, video games, computers, and parents and a society that feels the need to keep kids entertained, instead of giving them the tools to entertain themselves and taking a chance on letting them get bored and thereby motivated to get a life.
There is a lot of amateur engineers working on gadgets to improve the lives of people with disabilities. The market is often small but the rewards are tremendous. Enablemart shows has a lot of stuff that was invented in garages and small shops.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I'm making my own LCD monitor. Before you flip out and call bullshit, allow me to explain. I recently picked up a 3M 6150 LCD projection panel, the older type of full size LCD panel you stack on top of an overhead projector, for 10$. But there's no backlight, obviously.
There's NOTHING out there information wise about this screen. It has a 26 pin high density connector labeled 'computer'. It took me about 10 minutes to suss out the pinout. What you do is measure resistance to ground of each pin with the power off. Then you measure the voltage with the power on. I took apart a male HD DB15 to get the pins to probe with.
Ends up it has differential inputs for the video, 10/5/-5V supplies, single ended sync inputs, and two unknown logic signals. So I figured out the syncs by plugging my PC's sync in to it, when the screen no longer said 'no input signal' I had the H and V pins.
I was able to get datasheets for all the chips on the PCB, and I'm now trying to see if I should build 3 differential video amplifiers or modify the PCB to take single ended video. The A/D converters have their reference voltage at 430mV for the low and 5.1V for the high. Change the reference voltages and modify the input circuitry?
The 'funnest' part so far is trying to build a suitable backlight. I'm thinking 3 F6T5 fluorescents and associated hardware.
Thing is, everyone carries the stupid F6T5 bulbs, but no one carries the @$@#$@#$@ fixtures, ballasts or connectors! So I'm thinking I'll try 13W biax. Same thing again. Bulbs everywhere, no fixture.
What does this have to do with anything?
I don't know, but I sure feel better now.
This is old news
/. headline is right -- the loss to the electonics constuctor community is the gain to the computer hacker (in the true sense of the word) community, and open source is the obvious beneficiary.
I prety much saw this and went through this in my teenage years (way back when).
I started out being interested in electronics -- and saw basic microcomputer projects occaisionally appear in the elecronics magazine as these incredibly complex designs that I (at the time) couldn't understand what they were about.
As I gravitated towards computers (which is where I ended up making my career, after a brief flirtation with Physics), I saw the increase in shelf space in the newsagents of the early computer hobbyist magazines, coupled with the reduction in shelf space for electronics.
I think the
Thought it was worth mentioning, poptronics
January 2002 issue is in pdf format on the front page
-Faust
First of all amature science is alive and well. This dude walks into Frye's and asks a clerk for an .0001uH! So.. dude get a life.
inductor, if he was a true scientists he would roll his own inductor, it's not hard to do! I can
even tune one down to
As far as my amature projects go, try creating heat through a limestone catalyst! I've done it. Also my Solar panels charge several marine batteries, the marine batteries are connected to an APC 600 UPS (cheap power invertor!)
Ahh and there's my homebrew robotics. And there's the work with Linux I am doing.
I want to create a solar powered boiler that will
produce enough steam to drive a tesla turbine.
Ahh.. and there is the old fashion inductive load on the power lines. Could this be the source of
energy to drive my tesla coil next halloween? I can haul a large inductive 60Hz antennea in my
truck to the high power lines and hand an inductive load on the power line. That would be
cool.
I beleieve there's plenty of us out there.
also try
o nics.com
www.allelectronics.com
www.mpja.com
www.alltr
I order from all three on a regular basis. Check out alltronics surplus assortments, you will NOT be dissapointed if you order one. When they say 10 pounds of capacitors, they mean it, including some 6 inch tall 18000 mfd 48 volt ones, the last time I ordered that assortment.
for kits and some other cool things
www.ramseyelectronics.com
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That is the idea.
:-) Not serious money, but enough to finance another guitar or two, or pay for a holiday.
I'll probably sell the hardware design to Everyday Practical Electronics. This makes it easier for ppl to build the stuff, bcos EPE can get a few hundred PCBs cranked out and sold for a reasonable price to hobbyists. And it gets the design to a wider audience than it'd otherwise see if I just posted it on my website. Plus of course it lets me get a bit of cash from the time I've put into it!
The software (I'm planning on using Qt for the front end) will be freely available, along with the specs for the parallel port interface to the main programmer board. An API will be provided for adding new chips to the list supported by the programmer. The spec for the internal bus interface will also be available for ppl to design their own slave boards, to expand the programmer as they want. And the code for the PICs used to control it all will be available.
The only thing that may not be available will be DLLs for the chips supported. PICs are OK, their programming interface is public domain; most other chips use proprietary algorithms which require an NDA to be signed though, so you could only release the compiled code for that and not source. Not ideal, but that's the way the electronics industry works. And if ppl can at least contribute their own DLLs then it's open to individuals to expand the chips supported.
Grab.
I created a web site outlining the design and construction of a simple Scanning Tunneling Microscope. My experiences with the people that write me about the project most just read through the site and ask some basic questions about Scanning tunneling Microscopy and/or comment on the project. Rarely will some one write to tell me they are building it. These few are from all over the world and they are mostly students. It was exciting to hear from a kid in South Africa that had just gotten his first images with his microscope. I would encourage more amateur or semi-amateur scientists/engineers to publish open source projects on the web.
John Alexander
http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm
This reminds me of a scene from the movie "Dragnet".
Joe Friday and the virgin Connie Swail are sitting in a car on a cliff overlooking L.A. at night, and the virgin Connie Swail looks up at the sky and says, in awe, something to the effect of "Look at the stars! I can see dozens of them!".
I wonder how many people got the joke.
It's sad that many people rarely see the stars on a clear, dark night away from sources of light and air pollution.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
...is you often get a M$ license included in the price at no extra charge!
that sci am fired their best am sci columnist
for not being sufficiently dogmatically darwinist.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-