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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!!)
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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!
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'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...
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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
"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.
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,
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.
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!
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.
I'll concede that there are lots of people buying telescopes today compared with what there were a while ago, but as someone who's on the organising committee of an astronomical society, most of the people I see doing this are people who wouldn't have had one at all some time ago. The main reason they purchased a cheap telescope from a dealer, who incidently knew nothing about astronomy or telescopes, is because they also knew very little about astronomy. There are occasional exceptions, but when you buy a cheap telescope, you're usually sacrificing quality optics, and many who joined the society later discovered that the they'd purchased wasn't everything they wanted in the end.
On the other hand, nearly everyone who obtained a telescope after being a member for a few months has found it much more economical to either build their own, or have someone else do it. This doesn't mean they always do, because sometimes people want a more expensive commercial scope for doing more advanced stuff. There's so much you can do with a homebuilt dobsonian though, that most people have one at some point.
The seven or eight telescope building experts in the region probably each know more about telescope building than all of the commercial dealers put together. In most cases, they're in their own part time business of grinding high quality mirrors (or lenses) which they on-sell to amateur astronomers keen on building the rest of the scope themselves. People go to them because they provide higher quality equipment than most cheap machine-made equipment.
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 $2000 bike because it makes them feel young and fit. It will end up collecting dust in the cellar, but somebody made good money selling the bike. It is harder to sell a mirror grinding kit.
Gotta go...Antiques Roadshow is on!
There are more manufacturers out there, now. That's a good thing since people who don't have the time can at least get in the hobby and even contribute to science.
And anyone who complains they aren't into astronomy because they live in the city and have to deal with light pollution, doesn't understand the hobby, the science and the technology completely.
You can build your own telescope, your own CCD camera, and a cheap PC to run it and do some great science and take some great pretty pictures all from a very light polluted area.
Tons of creative tinkering, including in electronics, is happening these days in the build-it-yourself airplane movement. KitPlanes magazine has a column most months on how to assemble your own avionics circuits.
I'm making my own LCD monitor. Before you flip out and call bullshit, allow me to explain. I recently picked up a 3M 6150 LCD projection panel, the older type of full size LCD panel you stack on top of an overhead projector, for 10$. 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.