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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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$
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.
People these days would just rather have "somebody else" do it for them in most aspects of their lives.
I understand completely, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. The days when one man could do everything himself are nearing an end. There were days when you could make your own tools, chop your own wood, build your own house, hunt all your own food, make your clothes (etc ad nauseum). Now, it is much more advantageous to specialize in one particular skill, and use it to everyone's advantage.
For instance, if you're a really good computer programmer, and you specialize so much that you get paid well for it, then your time is worth more to you as a programmer, than, for instance, building a telescope or computer. If you want to study some astronomy in your spare time, it would take weeks of your "spare time" to make your own telescope first. Whereas, you could spend that time working, bring home some cash, and buy a telescope, so you can focus on what you're really interested in.
Specialization is a direct result of the complexity of our culture. Personally, I love gaming and building PCs, I don't really have the time to sit down and put together my own operating system, so I get pre-made distributions, usually here.
Other people, however, may be so interested in spending time coding that they would rather not put in the effort to build their own PC. So, they buy one (from Compaq, Dell, or, if you have the money, Alienware).
Do I hate people who buy pre-made machines? No. The fact is, I build my PCs out of pre-made parts, so I'm just as guilty, but on a different level. I have no idea how to make a sound card, and frankly, I don't really want to know. (And, there may be some guy out there that DOES know how, and thinks everyone is stupid for buying pre-made ones from Creative).
Do you see where this argument goes?
The speed of time is one second per second.
dobplans
Build Your Own 4 Inch Dobsonian Telescope
Telescope Making
Dobsonian Evolution
Small Dob Web Site
I built my own Dobsonian!!
> (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.
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.
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
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.
> (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.
alister wrote:
;)
/ le onidsidebar.html
> 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.
Depends on the science. There are some areas of astronomy that can be very cheap. Take meteor counting for instance. You can begin with a paper, a pencil, a timepiece and your eyes. Big spenders might opt for a clipboard, a red flashlight, a tape recorder and perhaps a mechanical counter. Those who prefer to live in the lap of luxury may opt for a comfy lounge chair.
And yes, you can perform real science doing this. After all, who is going to be caught funding the research grant for big name scientists to sit out in the cold and count meteors?
If you are really interested in doing this, check out:
http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/1101pr
"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
"Mosura", 1961
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...
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.
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,
---"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.
... research.
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."---
You're very much right. In general, sciences require much more expensive equipment. However, I see some branches that do not require more. First, is computer science. Making new algorithyms and tighter code require powerful software tools, but software is a unlimited resource (dont bother explaining that to corporate coders). The overall cost is 0$, and I would have no qualms about stealing (warezing) for non-money making projects.
The second field is that of basic electronics. The big costs here will be an occiliscope and an eeprom burner. With these tools, most any project can be made. You can make your own mod-chips (12c508a pic controller), or code your own. If you wanted that OGG player for your stereo, make a player, write your own tcp/ip stack, ethernet device, and boot rom code. It's hard, yes, but the amount you learn from this is immense. All you need is something to test (o-scope), and the chip burner. You might be able to get away from having a can network and have a can-to-lan device.
Another field that would be very interesting to look around is the high energy fields (tesla's patented projects, not any of that free energy-spook shit). Energy transmission seem sreally neat, but problems occur when they flood the full bandwidth with white noise (its what it does). The FCC doesnt like this
The last is chemistry projects. Saying chemistry has been all researched is totally moronic. It's like saying the best computer science was done 20 years ago. There's big money ahead, as in ways to figure out biological reactions for ammonia. The standard process (haber, right?) uses high pressure and high heat to break down n and h to make nh. Well, niotrogen-fixing bacteria can do this without either. We just got to find the right process.
Even mathematics is a possible goal for scientists. All you need is computers. You don't even need powerful ones, as discoveries are made constantly.If you can figure out a process, you solve one of many problems.
Astronomy is getting harder because focus is farther away.
Same with physics, as the viewpoint is on that really expensive horizion
Still there's lots of DIY stuff out there that is easy to maintain and just plain do
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
For example, with relatively inexpensive equipment ($500 or less), you can do lots of useful astronomy. Variable star observation, supernova discovery, comets, asteriods and meteor showers are just a few fields that are augmented (or even completely dominated) by amateurs. If you're handy, it's not all that hard to build a telescope, and you can save a few bucks (while learning a lot). For some activities you can get by on a pair of simple 10x50 or 7x50 binoculars.
For a big list of activities available to amateur astronomers, visit this link.
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
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.
Will you be making your PCB designs and software available, by chance?
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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-