[HH] electronics hobby industry

[Greg London]

> However, in the last decade we've clearly seen a turnaround on the
> technical front.

I'm not sure it's a turn-around so much as it's just been
moving upward. But the upward trend of awesome goodies
seems directly coupled with an upward trend of the barrier
to entry.

> The Arduino craze is just one highly visible example of that. Even big
> manufacturers, like TI, now seem to value and embrace hobbyists

Has that changed? I remember the TI99, which was pretty hackable.
Radio Shack had the color computer. Commodore had the 64.

I suppose there was a shift from the early 80's where everyone under
the sun was building and selling personal computers, and then
it seemed to crystalize into just the IBM PC XT and Apple II.

I think we hit a point where the power of embedded processors
got strong enough to run a real operating system and cheap
enough to be a "secondary" device, which has enabled more of
a return to an everyone under the sun is making computers again.
Except now its google with thin clients to the cloud and palm tops
and smart phones running some variation of linux.

Actually, if anything, I would say the thing that changed was
that when processors got small and powerful enough to run
linux in your smartphone, it allowed companies to use a new
business model: Subscription.

We had to pay in full for our ti99, TRS-80, commodore, and such.
By hiding the cost and spreading it out  over a two-year contract,
the initial purchase price pain goes away. I think that's enabled
businesses to create devices that wouldn't have sold without
a subscription model to pay for them.

The other thing that happened was the internet dropped the cost
for people to contribute to open source projects like linux.
We couldn't have wikipedia until the cost to contribute
was essentially hidden in the sunk cost of a computer and
internet connection that contributers already owned anyway.
Same with Linux.

If there's a singularity to the informaiton age, it's probably
the way that it has enabled millions of people to contribute
a little bit of energy to a project, with very little of that
energy being lost to the overhead of transmission, editing,
and whatnot.

It was a few years ago that they estimated that the number
of man hours contributed to Wikipedia alone had exceeded
the total number of manhours put into the moon shot.
The near zero cost to contribute (i.e. already paid for computer and
connection, which makes it a sunk cost) makes things possible
that weren't possible before.


> where they all but shunned them in past decades.

I think someone somewhere has always been selling embedded systems
that hobbyists try to leverage.

I think the difference is that, they're seeing that the internet
is a thing to leverage. Little microcontrollers like the arduino
have been around for years. The difference is that Arduino created
and encouraged an open source community behind it, (and there were
enough people with ocmputers and internet connections to feed that
open source community) and that turned into people creating
solutions, software, boards, add ons,  FAQ's, tutorials, and such,
that a company just doesn't have the time, energy, and budget to do.

> 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.

Well, we didn't have 3D printers in the 90's. That's caught a
lot of people's imaginations. In the 70's and 80's, people
were thinking that we were going to see robots walking and
talking. Heathkit sold an r2d2 inspired robot for a lot of money.
But it plateaued below a point where people we still interested
in it. today, we have roomba's, and that's about it.

teh US First robotics competitions are pretty cool,
and they get folks interested in robots, but we've hit
the plateau for what motors, batteries, and relay
transistors can do, for a certain level of money.

Mainly, we're never going ot see a bump above the plateau
until we get some seriously better energy storage.
Battery technology today just doesn't have the energy density.
Motors with any power are seriously expensive.
And transistors need some kind of fundamental improvement.
An H-bridge for something that take a hundred amps
is just too expensive.

But in the 70's, we didn't know those plateaus were there,
so they were inspiring ideas. I made a robot arm or two
in my day. they just aren't capable of what our minds
cna imagine.

Mostly, what we figured out, is that until we've got
some kind of AI behind the robot, it's just a dumb
remote control toy.

I'd say that 3D printers deserve a HUGE amount of credit
for the resurgence of the hacker community. It's got a lot
of potential. And we still don't know exactly where the
plateau is goign to be: How cheap will the printers get
and how high quality will the prints be? Will we be able
to print metal accurately and cheaply?

People are relating to them, articles are being written about
them, that describe them as a "santa claus" machine or a
Star Trek replicator. It's the potential that has a lot
of poeple interested and inspired.

And it takes a microcontroller, ardiuno or similar, to
build a 3d printer, so interest in 3d printers has spilled
over into getting people interested in micros. It will
be interesting ot see what happens when 3d printers
plateau. Another 10 years, maybe?

Back in the 80's, you could buy a book that was full of
nothing but schematics for a 555 timer. back then, a
555 might be an important piece of a larger design.
You'd be hard pressed to find people fired up to read
something like that now. Because a 555 by itself today is
rather uninteresting as far as what you can *do* with it.

The barrier to entry is a lot higher.

But so is the barrier to grab someone's interest.



> 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,

Right now, I'd say at least *some* of it is just a residual from
teh recession.

> 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.

Brick and mortar is losing out, for sure.

> 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.).

I don't think that's too different from RadioShack from the 80's.
Back then, they sold electronic components, but htey also sold
CB radios, stereos, TV stuff, TRS-80 personal computers,
the CO-CO, and such. My memory could be blurring together on that,
but I never saw them as *just* selling electronic components for
hobbyists.