American Electronics Hobbyist Census [pdf]

http://media.jameco.com/7786/Great_American_Electronics_Hobbyist_Census_Executive_Report.pdf

by epalmer • 11 years ago

33 36 11 years ago

media.jameco.com

epalmer5• 11 years ago

OP here: This explains my obsession for building widgets and little robots to my wife.

imr• 11 years ago

What are they referring to with the phrase "open source microcontroller"? I must spend too much time with ARM cortex parts, I had no idea there are popular open cores.

minthd• 11 years ago

Probably the arduino - with the open source libraries and such.

yitchelle• 11 years ago

Some movements at http://opencores.org/

vonmoltke2• 11 years ago

38% report blowing something up on purpose

Also, 62% are lying their asses off on this questionnaire. :)

OldSchool• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'm going to "guess" that as late as the 1970's at least, almost 100% of male children succeeded at blowing up stuff on purpose, whether or not they were electronics hobbyists.

epalmer5• 11 years ago

OP here. I'm 61. When I was in High School I unwrapped a model rocket engine and lit it. Wow was that stupid. It came right at me and then exploded. No harm but did not try that again.

vonmoltke2• 11 years ago

One of your first three thoughts after blowing an electrolytic cap for the first time is bound to be, "That was cool! How do I do that again?"

zeeshanm2• 11 years ago

This is so accurate:

> They are convinced that the American economy is at least in part fueled by this hobby and believe emphasis of electronics in education is immensely valuable.
> This is not a new passion, in fact most began by taking things apart at a young age and have spent 35 years or more pursuing their avocation. While they haven’t always had a lot of time to pursue electronics as a hobby, they expect that it will become a larger part of their lives in the near future.
> Hobbyists believe that this is first and foremost a hobby about creativity that transforms from an idea into something tangible. New technology and renewed devotions have given electronics hobbyists the ability to create almost anything they can dream up and yet at the end of the day there is a childish affection that succumbs to goofing around and playing with fun, blinking lights.
> This is an old-boys club very much split between those that make their living with electronics during the day and then use it to play and those that pursue it as a pure pastime. For those who see it as a pure hobby, a large percentage are self-taught but are no less skilled nor passionate than those who have dedicated all aspects of their life to electronics.

epalmer5• 11 years ago

OP here: I have two daughters. One builds things (robots) and one does not. But there are so few women as electronic hobbyists. FIRST Robotics is helping bring young women into the fabrication maker mentality. I just wish it could happen faster.

ild11• 11 years ago

Building "robots" is a lame thing; teach her the real things: batteries, leds etc.

ild11• 11 years ago

Arduino IMHO is bad and harmful: it "gentrifies" the hobby, floods it with people who have no desire to learn the basics.

greenNote• 11 years ago

Partially agree, the same could be said about the Parallax crowd 20 years ago.

I think the real problem is Abstraction. Most things are assembled as blocks, with no idea how the blocks work. It seems like many projects today consist of, A) Take X microcontroller B) Add Y1, Y2, Yx component blocks (LCD screen, motor controller, etc.) C) Add connecting wires D) Use manufacture supplied libraries E) Add some custom code for your domain.

krupan2• 11 years ago

Which is exactly the progression that software made. When was the last time you wrote your own bios, bootloader, os, device drivers, filesystem, network stack, etc.? You don't do that now, as you said, "most things are assembled as blocks," except it's worse than that, you just get a big monolithic "OS" now days install that on your desktop and then you write "custom code for your domain."

I don't think this is a bad thing, since all that software that you don't write yourself is available as open source and you can still dig in and see how it works if you want. I'm not a close follower of arduino, but from what I understand the low-level code and board schematics and layout are open source, so it's kind of the same idea. I don't think the processor is open source though (having the verilog code, timing constraints, layout, etc. for that would be the ideal).

CognitiveLens• 11 years ago

To be fair, every generation skips the basics learned by the previous generation to some extent - standing on the shoulders of giants is the only way to reach further.

There's definitely value in digging deeper into more fundamental components, but I wouldn't say that doing so is the only way to advance the field, and even if there's a flood of superficial hobbyists, would you argue that there are actually fewer people who learn the basics?

ild11• 11 years ago

fewer people who learn the basics?

It stays constant, but the noise increases.

ptorrone• 11 years ago

this is going to go in my collection of classic comments about arduino, you're saying arduino is "bad" and "harmful" (to who and how?) because more, and different people than you might get interested in electronics as a hobby. wow.

here's another you may enjoy from my article "Why the Arduino Won and Why It’s Here to Stay"

“Arduino: baby-talk programming for pothead” – ArnoldB, AVRfreaks.net http://makezine.com/2011/02/10/why-the-arduino-won-and-why-i...

disclosure, i work at the open-source hardware company, adafruit and we make arduinos for arduino.cc !

ild11• 11 years ago

to who?

Everyone and especially the arduinists themselves.

people than you might get interested in electronics as a hobby. wow.

People get interested in Arduino, not electronics; they get interested in the bling, not how it works. Instead of wasting time with Arduino, they can as well just read the datasheets.

ild11• 11 years ago

Besides, last time I checked "open-source hardware" meant VHDL, Verilog and FPGA. The word has been hijacked I guess.

Arduino, as a piece of hardware btw is a nice development kit on its own.

drcube• 11 years ago

Gentrification is bad because it pushes out the people who can no longer afford it. How does Arduino do this to electronics hobbyists?

ild11• 11 years ago

There was a link on HN recently about gentrification of the concept "hacker". It explains better than I can do.

Animats• 11 years ago

It's amusing to note the hostility towards surface-mounted devices. You don't find that in Shentzen. That may be a Jameco issue. If you use SMDs, you don't get them from Jameco.

I sometimes buy from Jameco, but only because their HQ is about a mile from me and they have will-call. Online ordering is Digi-Key or Mouser.

smoyer• 11 years ago

I didn't even realize JameCo was still in business ... at my first engineering job, we bought most of our parts from JDK Microdevices and JameCo. If something was less common, it might come from Newark. Since this was prior to the Internet (1983?), you had to get the catalogs from the vendors and peruse them.

Digikey and the Internet have changed things dramatically!

zeeshanm2• 11 years ago

octopart.com is another good one. They have prices from all distributors in one place.

American Electronics Hobbyist Census [pdf]

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