After the Heathkits and Altairs of the 1970s went away, they left behind a sad landscape for electronics hobbyists. As a case in point, the handy local Radio Shack slowly shifted away from selling things useful to hobbyists, becoming just a re-branded electronics store and stocking very little in the way of components. Most of their space seems to be devoted to cell phones these days. Market trends such as surface mount technology, low voltage electronics and ever-increasing complexity seemed to doom the hobbyist electronics world forever. Yet the “long tail” of the internet has given rise to a new breed of electronic store carrying components, breakout boards and the like that can be used in building-block fashion to produce new designs and functionality. This has brought together a community of like-minded “makers” who then use the plethora of online parts stores and batch PCB manufacturing houses to enter this marketplace themselves. Each bit adding cumulatively in true open-source fashion leaves a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. Never before has the barrier to entry been so low, complete microcontroller development kits can had for under $20, and sub $100 CPLD and FPGA development kits allow the creation and deployment of complex digital designs (custom CPU cores for example) that were once only within the realm of extremely well-funded ASIC designers.
I find myself to be addicted to electronic things. I’ve surrounded myself with bits of circuit board with wires attached. The words “development kit” or “eval board” or “prototype” sets me off thinking of the potential and possibilities. I savor the chance to learn something new, to make something just a little bit better or just to do something myself. I like to look at naked pictures of circuit boards. I like to reverse engineer and repurpose hardware to do things it was never intended to do. I’m a programmer with a screwdriver and a soldering iron.
Stay tuned for more adventures…
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