When I was a kid, I remember running across a Heathkit tube amplifier in the garage. I never saw it work, and I don’t know why dad built it. It was only about 5" by 8", as opposed to being a stereo component. This was back in the days when every supermarket and Thrifty Drug Store had vacuum tubes and a tube tester. And Thrifty Drug Stores still existed. (Mmm… Ice cream!) When you went into a Radio Shack, half the store was filled with electronic components and equipment. (The other half was electric/electronic toys/gadgets, CB radios, and Realistic stereos.)
Nowadays our electronic devices don’t use transistors and diodes on a breadboard; everything is microscopically imprinted on a printed circuit chip. Today’s technology is faster, more reliable, uses less power, is smaller and lighter, cheaper, and orders of magnitude more capable than the technology of the '60s and '70s. But it’s also disposable. Before, if your AM/FM radio crapped out, you could diagnose the problem and replace the failed component. Today, you either replace the entire ‘motherboard’ or toss the gadget and buy a new one.
I know there are places like Edmund Scientific where you can buy an AM/FM radio kit and other such things; but this type of kit seems to be fore novelty purposes, whereas in the old days people would buy a Heathkit or Radi Shack radio kit or amplifier or whatever because they wanted a radio or amplifier or whatever. That is, DIY electronics were a legitimate alternative to mass-produced ‘off the shelf’ consumer items. I suspect that with so many other things to occupy our time, many hobbies have experienced a decline.
I was part of what was probably the last gasp of hobby electronics, in the early-mid 80s, just as most of the crowd was leaving for computers. (Some self-built.) (I am tickled pink that I routinely drive by the offices of the old Circuit Cellar. Must stop in and say hi one day.)
It’s just too easy to buy cheap electronic goods, many of which are far too complex for hobbyist construction or tinkering. Sad, really.
The electronics hobby has moved on from using kits to make things things like radios, amps, and so forth. Those things are so readily available in better, cheaper, easier mass-produced forms that few people see a point in building them.
Most people involved in hobby electronics now focus on one-off or unusual devices–things that no one is manufacturing, either because the potential market is too small or because no one has thought of it. They build remote-controlled Halloween props, moisture monitors that let their houseplants text them when they need watering, control boxes to trigger pyro effects in time with music, and so forth. It’s true that a lot of these projects have kits at their cores, but the kits in question are usually microcontrollers and small computers like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, rather than bags of discrete components.
That does mean that, in some ways, there’s a higher barrier to entry these days. On the other hand, there are many more resources to help, too–beowulff’s links are just a tiny sample.
People are mainly building at a higher level now. I built my first computer from a kit that consisted of a few PC boards and the required ICs. Half of the remaining discreet components were missing and the half of the rest were unmarked. I built my own power supply from scratch, and it never got put in a case. For a long time now people have built computers by assembling already built cards, motherboards, power supplies, cases, cooling systems, etc. People are also building robots with modular components, and building 3D printers from kits and plans. We’re heading toward the point where your 3D printer will make the parts that your robot assembles into your custom hoverbike.
The DIY electronics market is as good as it’s ever been, in my experience (admittedly, I’m only in my thirties).
It’s true that hardly anyone repairs stuff any more, but that’s not because it’s impossible, just that electronics have gotten so cheap that it’s almost never worth it.
If I have some custom circuit in mind, I can design it in Eagle (free PCB design software) in a few hours. I then export the design to a zip file that I send over the net to a batch-processing house that combines multiple designs together to save costs. It costs about $5 sq-in.
In a couple of weeks the boards arrive, and in the meantime I’ve ordered everything else I need–often in single-unit quantities–from Mouser or Digikey. I load the board up with solder paste and the components and stick it in a toaster oven to reflow.
At the end I have a professional-quality board using the same surface-mount components that industry uses. It’s exactly what I want and it cost only a few tens of dollars. There’s no way I could have accomplished that even ten years ago.
Yes, the primary focus of my days in hobby electronics was designing things that no one sold, or that could be DIY’ed much more cheaply or with options not available commercially. That’s still all valid. The advent of cheap one-off or limited-number PCBs is a gift from the gods; it used to take a long, messy, fussy time photo-etch and drill your own, or cost a fortune for a prototype or two. I loved it when the project was deemed worthy of one of the magazines underwriting a run of 100 boards or so.
Part of my last-gasp involvement was with the Australian ventures here, which failed. Hobby electronics was extremely vibrant and active downunda, because the import duties on things like audio gear and speakers made it extremely cost-effective to build your own. This was also in the hobby satellite era, and I designed quite a few boxes for self, hobby, magazine and kit builds.
I still fire everything up and build a widget now and again. F’rex, I got tired of replacing the fussy, expensive and fragile headlight-dimming relay in my summer car (based on old Volks/Audi tech and basically a tiny clockwork machine in a relay box) and built one that looks the same but uses all solid-state guts. Bulletproof and could be finished to pass even sniffy concours inspections.
Electronics as a hobby is still going strong, but it’s different than it used to be. Very few people are going to repair consumer electronics these days, in part because the stuff is so cheap, but also because components are so tiny and integrated that repairs are generally outside the skill range of even very advanced hobbyists.
But there are plenty of people still building stuff from kits. Microcontroller platforms like Arduino have opened up electronics to a whole new generation of hobbyists, in particular.
I recently developed an obsession with modular analog synthesizers, and have been slowly assembling my own instrument. I buy boards from Music From Outer Space, source all the components from Mouser (which will still happily sell you a single through-hole resistor if you want) and then do a metric assload of soldering.
I also built some oscillators, LFOs, and have some envelope generators and noise sources in the pipeline.
I rescued an old analog oscilloscope and power supply from Craigslist for a total of about sixty bucks, too. It’s a lot of fun. I have no idea what I’m doing but I can solder and follow directions and the stuff actually works.
Another great place to find hobbyist stuff is SparkFun, which caters to the hobbyist/maker crowd. I’ve gotten a lot of parts and useful stuff from them.
It’s true that the very smallest stuff, like 0201 or 01005 SMD components, are pretty difficult to work with.
But 0603 and higher are pretty easy in my experience, not to mention many IC packages like LQFP, and overall I greatly prefer them to through-hole. Anyone comfortable with through-hole should give it a try!
My first serious stereo system was a Dynaco PAT 4 preamp, Dynaco 120 Power Amp, Dynaco FM 5 tuner, Phillips GA-212 turntable, and a pair of large Advents in the utility boxes. The Dynacos were kits that came with the components pre-soldered to the circuit boards. It was a great system, I wish I still had it.
That was back in the mid 70s.
Oh, and referring to the OP, there was Hi Fidelity before there was stereo.
I did exactly that for my bachelor’s thesis in 1973. And I laid out the boards using sticky tape, got it photographed, and etched it myself in acid. Great fun. Never want to do it again.
I suspect people do DiY for the fun of doing it, not even to use the results. I’m going to program when I retire for the same reason. I’ve already written code for the pleasure of writing it. I tried it a few times, saw that it worked, and then abandoned it.
I keep meaning to try my hand at some BGA stuff, actually. It probably requires a high-quality solder mask (I usually just use a syringe). Sure, repairs are tough, but the initial soldering shouldn’t be too different from anything else as long as I’m careful with the amount.
I’ve done a bit of work with QFN, and it’s not so bad either. I could really use a microscope, though.
Are your fingers still stained from the ferric chloride?
I only ever used the boards with pre-applied photoresist. It was certainly a tremendous pain given the low-quality results. Even a two-layer board was out of reach with the amount of time I was willing to put in.
QFN is trivial, since you can see the solder filet.
I have a Stereozoom I bought from my first employer - best thing that ever happened with that company!
I did it for a number of years. When we moved a few years ago, I found one of my masterworks - a huge, enormously complex board layout for a satellite receiver - all done in ink and stickies. I wavered back and forth about keeping it, perhaps to frame, but it was coming apart a bit and I was in a hard-hearted “gridda thishit” mode. Regret it now, along with a few other items. It wouldn’t have taken any space in my thin stack of large items…
Went to AutoCAD just after that, and now of course, you can do pretty elaborate stuff even with the freeware layout tools. I used one of those for the headlight controller and was pleasantly boggled at how accessible the tool and process had become.
