[HH] electronics hobby industry

[Tom Metro]

Greg London wrote:
> Well, I'm not sure if there is some sort of underlying tradoff
> mechanism at play or if this is completely unrelated, but:
> [...]
> But if you want to design your own smart phone today from scratch,
> you're looking at a tech startup company, not some hobby that
> starts with a trip to RadioShack. custom ASIC design, creating your
> own embedded operating system, yada, yada, yada.
> 
> The barrier to entry is a whole lot higher now than it used to be.

This is a spot-on explanation for the decline of the electronics hobby
field since the 80's. (At least as far as the technical barriers. There
likely were cultural barriers as well. For example, hacking software on
abundantly available personal computers may have "absorbed" so much of
the mind share of hacking-minded kids and hobbyists that only the most
dedicated hardware hackers stuck with the field.)

However, in the last decade we've clearly seen a turnaround on the
technical front. While modern devices like smartphones still aren't
hackable in the way a cassette player from the 80s was, commercial and
open source developers have stepped up with a wealth of hardware hacking
products aimed at hobbyists.

The Arduino craze is just one highly visible example of that. Even big
manufacturers, like TI, now seem to value and embrace hobbyists (see
their BeagleBoard line; perhaps learning a lesson from observing
Microchip's success with the PIC family of MCUs in the 90s), where they
all but shunned them in past decades.

Sure, it's near impossible to make something that doesn't involve some
firmware, but vendors have made the process of developing firmware
orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than it used to be. Even custom
ASICs can be emulated with hobby-friendly FPGAs.

Coincident with this change is the return of hardware hacking
publications, like Make Magazine, and dozens of web sites.

Clearly there is some sort of a thriving electronics hobby industry
today supporting companies like Sparkfun, adafruit, and Artisan's
Asylum, that was absent from the late 90s.

What is far less clear is whether the overall size of the field is in
the same neighborhood as it was in the 80s, or if it is a tiny fraction
of what it was, but just seems more visible now because the Internet
lets us aggregate an international collection of vendors and information
sources catering to the field.

So this was the basis of my question: are we not seeing a matching
resurgence of retailers aimed at electronics hobbyists because the
market is still too small, or simply because such a business has been
impacted in the same way most niche retailers have been driven online.
Why setup retail space and deal with the cost and hassle of opening
multiple locations if you can do as much business or more with a
warehouse and a web site? Thus adafruit, Sparkfun, etc.

You-Do-It perhaps only survives because it caters to professional
technicians, and diversified into other areas of electronics retail
(stereo equipment, TVs, DJ gear, security cameras, etc.).

 -Tom