This is an excellent article, detailed and thoughtful. Thanks.
Got me thinking about some business things, and apologies if this goes
off topic....
50 years ago there were a wealth of books for electronic hobbyists to
build things like this - home automation, home security, plant
irrigation systems and suchlike.
Later an industry sprang up to make products for this market which was
initially niche and geeky. Small companies became big companies. Big
companies became shitty, extractive, exploitative monopoly companies
as the author describes.
Today we lament an apparent choice between "convenience" and "too much
work to do yourself". The cynics and naysayers are always keen to
point out just how few people can accomplish anything like this - and
that is indeed true.
But between the lonely hobbyist with soldering iron in hand, and the
big technology company was an era that seems almost dead today (for
many reasons like customer support and reliable sourcing). It was the
kit movement. Many of the early microcomputers were in fact kits.
Clive Sinclair first offered the ZX80 as a "solder it yourself" job.
Heathkit hifi and music synthesisers were a big thing for a while.
Many people who couldn't build a home system like this might be
interested in a DIY solution if they had a big helping hand up. I
wonder what happened to the kit economy and why it doesn't work as a
business model any more.
"back in the day", it was hard to get anything, computers were expensive, electronics (except very basic) were hard to source, and prebuilt software (for whatever custom use) was non-existant.
Now, a microcontroller with wifi and bluetooth is <$5, a computer/server for running code is ~$50 (if you manage to find a raspberrypi, or a bit more for a micro pc), wireless interfaces (zigbee, bluetooth) are cheap, prebuilt code for sensors (tasmota, esphome,...) is very mature and stable, central management systems (home assistant,...) are stable and support pretty much everything...
The only problem I see is, that a lot of people have lost their tinkering capabilities and don't want to get their hands dirty compared to "back then" when a lot of stuff needed getting your hands dirty and more people went along the DIY path.
Agreed, and the ease of 'assembling' various components is much easier now. Even the project in this article has very little soldering/individual components besides a few pull up resistors and some LEDs, both of which could have been on breakout boards. Everything else is just pin headers and jumpers to/from prebuilt boards.
The Heathkits and even things like the Radio Shack spring-wire 250-in-one type kits had you build circuits from all individual components: resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, inductors, etc. If lucky, maybe a few basic ICs like triple-nickels, op-amps, comparators. After hours of soldering/wiring you had something that did some very basic function - not a microcontroller/SBC with full programming language support and more power than a supercomputer a few decades ago.
Back in the day, kit radios were about as advanced as you could get with DIY electronics. You can still buy kit ham radios but the advancements that have been made in what is available for hackers is enormous. A full fleged computer the size of a deck of cards is amazing. This guy built an incredibly complex security system using off the shelf components that could have easily required zero soldering had he only used wireless sensors. His design is maybe a little over engineered (tamper switches on junction boxes?) and is probably much better than what any residential alarm company could offer.
Back in the 60's through the 90's we also had Haltech and Halted Specialties, electronics supplies and surplus in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, each about a mile from each other.
Many folks confused the names.
As I recall, both of them had resident cats as well.
My High School electronics teacher turned me onto them in 1969.
It appears Haltech is defunct, and not surprising since the owner was OLD when I was shopping/browsing there in the 70's - 80's.
Oh, looks like Halted changed their name to HSC and may still be in business.
If you believe radio kits were as advanced as one could buy "back in the day", I guess you never looked at a HeathKit catalog, they offered all kinds of kits more sophisticated than radios.
In 1980 I got one of these kits for my auto repair shop, and yes, it was quite a challenge to build, but it saved me hours of automotive diagnostic time.
A comparable automotive ignition analyzer scope at the time was thousands of dollars.
I think they're talking about lack of motivation to DIY. Yes, it is exponentally easier or cheaper, but the draw back then was "It was either impossible to get or ridiculously expensive to buy something you can DIY".
Nowadays it's mostly reversed, so many gadgets can be just bought for cheap, hell even if you want DIY what you will DIY changed massively.
Back in ye olde stuff like signal generator or power supply was probably the stuff you DIYed or made from kit, nowadays they are so cheap and so much better than whatever you'd make first. On flip side dev boards or breakout boards with various "fun" devices are aplenty so your first projects might be something actual EE might've spend week to build in the 90s
The "everything is a breakout board" might make people not start with the basics at first but in the end I think that lower barrier to entry is a good thing here
Back in the day, business computers were the most powerful systems. Nowadays, it's consumer electronics that is getting more powerful. Which is great for consumers. But not so great for startups who want to build their company on top of these systems.
I think the software dimension adds some fuzziness to what can be considered a complete 'kit'. For instance, I've been able to piece together a voice assistant using a Matrix Creator [0] and a home alarm retrofit using Konnected [1] that is more tailored to my needs than any commercial offering could be. Both projects can be thought of as kits, but one can take any number of paths toward setting up and maintaining the software behind the system. Furthermore, the pace of development is so quick that a particular system may lose development interest to a newer sexier project, and if your system connects with third-party APIs, that is always a moving target.
So, I think the spirit of kits lives on, just in a different way :)
No. I see those occupying the approximate space as Radio Shack and
Maplin used to, and in the same period (pre-2000) they would stand in
contrast to component level only supplies like Radio Spares etc. The
kit market in electronics never really reached the level of say the
kit-car industry, or marine design space where very detailed hull and
outfitting plans would be sold alongside specialist materials and
support. What was going on in that space was almost like flat-pack
furniture; a full product but with highly customisable self-labour.
Oddly, flat-pack furniture has become the norm and self-assembly is
expected for most products. Obviously this has to do with size,
weight, shipping etc.
I guess we're seeing different things? I just got back into hobby electronics and the kit market in electronics seems pretty healthy. I mean, I don't have any hard numbers, but there's a lot of activity.
- - - -
To me the sequence of events in the RepRap (self-printable 3D printers concept) space is very telling: the middle ground between hobbyists and professionals seems to have hollowed out. You can design a part and have it printed and shipped to you within days, of pretty much arbitrarily high quality, involving plastic, metal, rubber, etc...
Or you can get a kit for a 3D printer, but it will take time before you can actually print well enough to do anything useful, in the sense of being economically competitive with the 3D print shops or e.g. the Daiso chain.
Daiso is incredible. You can outfit an enter household with quality items for just a dollar or two each. Average item price is about $1.75 I'd guess. That covers the entire thing: raw materials, design, manufacturing, distribution, profit, etc... You're just not going to beat that with a toy 3D printer on your kitchen table, eh?
I think for people willing to put in the time — things have certainly become much easier. I started with AVR microcontrollers about 20 years ago, and couldn't even dream of accomplishing things I am easily able to to today. Raspberry Pi, Arduino; have changed the scene for sure.
But at the same time; maybe there is less inventive for someone to really dig into something, as you say: with soldering iron in hand. As so much is available as a product or service already.
My first "serious" soldering was a few PCB kits :)
The x86 platform is sort of a kit economy, where you build your own systems from separate components. And it's a great business model, just not targeted at end-consumers, but at industry.
There is always a new layer of abstraction available when it comes to building your own thing. You can still build a radio from a rusty razorblade but nowadays, building your own radio means buying a simple rtlsdr and setting up your own modem in gnuradio. The added layers of abstraction make it easier to do more with less time and effort. You can even design your own SDR but you'll still be buying VCOs and FPGAs since it's not really possible to do it with discretes, let alone homemade discretes. The economy of scale has greatly reduced the cost of using more advanced components. Someone could build a similar security system using all off the shelf wireless sensors without making a single solder joint. The challenge for a lot of DIY projects now involves the software, whether that means writing your own or hooking up various applications and services. Sure, you could build your own microcontroller board to talk to the sensors but that's a lot of effort you could instead apply to the software side of things.
Got me thinking about some business things, and apologies if this goes off topic....
50 years ago there were a wealth of books for electronic hobbyists to build things like this - home automation, home security, plant irrigation systems and suchlike.
Later an industry sprang up to make products for this market which was initially niche and geeky. Small companies became big companies. Big companies became shitty, extractive, exploitative monopoly companies as the author describes.
Today we lament an apparent choice between "convenience" and "too much work to do yourself". The cynics and naysayers are always keen to point out just how few people can accomplish anything like this - and that is indeed true.
But between the lonely hobbyist with soldering iron in hand, and the big technology company was an era that seems almost dead today (for many reasons like customer support and reliable sourcing). It was the kit movement. Many of the early microcomputers were in fact kits. Clive Sinclair first offered the ZX80 as a "solder it yourself" job. Heathkit hifi and music synthesisers were a big thing for a while.
Many people who couldn't build a home system like this might be interested in a DIY solution if they had a big helping hand up. I wonder what happened to the kit economy and why it doesn't work as a business model any more.