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.

Comments

Telescope-building is not astronomy

[Macrobat]

I have a friend who owns two telescopes and two pairs of high-powered binoculars. We've gone out and scoped out the rings of Saturn, comet Ikeya-Zhang, and solar activity (with really strong filters). The availability of cheap telescopes does not mean the end of amateur astronomy, it means the end of amateur telescope-building.

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.

Even not so complex is not possible anymore.

[MavEtJu]

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 :-)

Re:Even not so complex is not possible anymore.

[Christopher Thomas]

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).

You can buy a host of programmable microcontrollers from a variety of vendors; check Digikey's catalog for a sampling. Many of these should adequately substitute for a Z80.

Also, how "easy" is it these days to add an self-developped extensionboard into your computer?

Not that hard.

I was building a project driven off of a parallel port a couple of weeks back. These won't go away for a few years yet, and you can clock them as slowly as you want to.

You can also still find motherboards with ISA slots for new machines; at 8 MHz or so, you could certainly put something together with a microcontroller and discrete logic that would fit in a standard system.

If parallel ports and ISA slots disappear down the road... there will be legacy support for the 10 MBit version of USB for quite a while, and the controller for that is simple enough that you could easily build one with a microcontroller and some glue logic.

In summary, I don't think there will be a problem any time soon.

I disagree.

[red_gnom]

I strongly disagree that it is cheaper to buy a telescope, than to make it by yourself. There is no way "ready to buy" telescopes could come close to the quality of image you can get with home made dobsonian telescopes in the same price category.

dobplans

Build Your Own 4 Inch Dobsonian Telescope

Telescope Making

Dobsonian Evolution

Small Dob Web Site

I built my own Dobsonian!!

Soldering Surface Mount isn't that hard.

[TechyImmigrant]

> (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.

Re:Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist"

[Tekgno]

The chamber is known as a vortex tube the German name is the WhirbelRohr.

Basically, you have a cylinder with both ends sealed off, on each end you attach a narrow length of pipe, one tube has a large hole goin through into the cylinder, the other has a smaller hole, slightly smaller. Both of these holes are axially placed. Now you add another tube to the side of cylinder, but placed so that it enters at a tangent, this also has a hole into the cylinder.
Now force air into the tube on the side, as the air is injected tangentally to the cylinder, the air will swirl around around it eventually gets to the center. Pressure variations inside the cylinder will seperate the air into hot and cold, hot will come out of one pipe and cold the other.
This device will also produce a strange noise, any attempt to cancel this noise will stop the device from functioning.

Further details can be found Here
I have been considering using this in a cooling mod but as my parents complain enough about the current noise, I don't think I'll push my luck any further. Besides, steps need to be taken to handle condensation on the cold tube.

Building the device to ideal measurements will get you some very cold air:

>compressed air at room temperature (20 C) could
>in principle be cooled to about -258 C, a mere
>15 degrees above absolute zero! (The
>corresponding temperature of the hot side would
>have been 80
>C.)

Re:Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist"

[Animats]

* even use an interestingly shaped chamber (can't remember the name, dammit!) to turn a stream of pressurized air into two streams -- one very chilled and one very hot -- using nothing more than the shape of the cylinder.

Thats a Hilsch Vortex Tube. A friend of mine made one out of brass in college. (This back when a computer maintenance shop required a lathe.) It works, but it's an inefficient refrigerator. The basic idea is to centrifugally separate fast-moving and slow-moving atoms, like Maxwell's Daemon. It doesn't violate conservation of energy, although the proof of that is involved.

Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not.

[Grishnakh]

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.