Another factor was the emergence of massive cheap off-shore manufacturing. This meant you could buy ready-built products cheaper than you could buy the parts and build one yourself. A good example is a power supply. Even a complex switch mode supply for a PC cost less than $30 bucks. Why bother with building your own? Lots of products turned out like this, especially computer-related boards and modules. No wonder the kit companies went away.
One other problem is test equipment. At one time you could test what you built with a volt-ohmmeter and maybe a cheap 5 MHz single channel scope. Signal generators, power/SWR meters and counters were pretty inexpensive and you could even build your own. But today, you need a scope with a bandwidth of up to 1 GHz, a logic analyzer, and maybe even an AWG. With typical prices over $10k each, what hobbyist could afford them?
Anyway, you get the picture.
But the large scale ICs had another affect. It allowed manufacturers to create whole new families of exciting and useful products like cell phones, MP3 players, DVDs, and laptop computers. How do you get a 10-year-old kid excited about receiving an AM radio station on a crystal radio if he already has his own cell phone, MP3 player, and TV set? Boooorring... Although if you can get a 10-year-old to build a crystal set, I have found that the "Eureka effect" of having made something yourself that actually works, simple as it is, still yields a positive, confidence-building end result.
Where Are We Today?
Yes there are still some of the electronic hobbyists I described active today. Their nature has changed considerably, but they still like to build small projects with older parts. And there are a few kit companies still out there to serve them (Ramsey, Elenco, Kelvin, Jameco, and a few others). There seems to be three distinct concentrations of hobbyist: amateur radio hams, those who like robots, and the new breed of hobbyist that builds projects with embedded controllers. The hams are a big category. There are about 650,000 hams in the U.S. and about 3 million worldwide according to Allen Pitts of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for ham radio. Of those 650,000, I suspect that over half are what we generally refer to as "appliance operators." These are the hams who buy all their commercial gear and really don't get into building equipment. The remainder are indeed true hobbyists, as they do build, design, experiment, and get involved at a greater depth with the equipment. The ARRLs publications (QST and QEX) are probably the best electronic hobbyist magazines available. (www.arrl.org)
The robot crowd has been around for a few years. It all started back in the 1980s with a robot interest group spinning off from the computer hobbyists. Then the Heathkit Hero robot came along and created a stir that has grown year after year. The Battle Bots competitions on TV also turned many on to this hobby of building and playing around with robots. There are lots of kits available, many of which are used as teaching platforms in some colleges. The Lego robot platform is a super product that is a toy and a serious learning tool. The robot guys even have their own magazine, Servo.
I think you should get over your hatred of C. It is a language tool that is truly optimized for larger systems. It is a real tool even though it is a "language tool" as is Assembler. A larger pipe wrench can make a large pipe turn when a smaller one might not accomplish a thing. The right tool makes the job easier for the worker, but more importantly enables the worker to do the job more effectively. I can't think of a language that had as much professional thought put into it than C. It is a tool crafted by it's users for it's users. It offers portability to other processors or MCU's. The programming effort you put forward on one type of MCU can easily be used on another with minimal or no changes to your code. Assembler is ideal for small well defineable tasks, but if you want to integrate many small well defined tasks into a whole system as you were speaking of then C is the wrench. If you want to go to even larger systems with alot of people involved in the programming (say a computer game with wild graphics) then C++. I understand this "hatred", I used to hate C++ till I learned a little of it and now see the limitations of C.
Anonymous -September 06, 2009
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