R.I.P for D.I.Y Or Long Live Open Source? 344
Embedded Geek writes "Scientific American has an article on the decline of science hobbyists. It presents a long litany of woe you'd expect about the "Good Old Days" (the death of classic electronic tinkering magazines, Edmund Scientific's corporate changes, and the cancelation of SciAm's own "Amateur Scientist" column), but also discusses some of the real trends in technology that have caused these changes. Declining manufacturing costs now make it cheaper to buy a telescope, radio, or computer than to build one yourself. The increased complexity of our gadgets doesn't help either (Ever tried to fix surface mount components with a soldering iron at your kitchen table? Don't!!)
"
Personally, I found the tranformation of science amateurs into "quasi-professionals" intriguing. The Society for Amateur Scientists now holds sessions on how to publish research and how to claim tax deductions for home laboratories. Also, amateur astronmers are making great strides in comet discovery. Being that most of the people in the open source movement are software professionals, it becomes easy to draw an analogy between it and tinkering of yore.
A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:4, Interesting)
Where 20 years ago, the efforts of the amateur were largely directed to the construction of equipment, now he or she can work at actual research.
This is of course an extreme generalization, but just because the days of saudering irons and garages might be winding down, that doesn't mean that dedicated individuals outside of the academic and professional communities will no longer be contributing to the advancement of science.
I will miss the amateur column in Sci Am though, I got a lot of good ideas from there.
Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:4, Interesting)
I never got into building electronic stuff, but I'm interested in building guitars [mimf.com]. Lately, I've been itching to build my own guitar amp. There is even a website [ax84.com] devoted to it. Thanks to the numerous web [frets.com] resources [jps.net] out there, I can learn to build all sorts of crazy things that I never could have figured out on my own.
I suspect that the people that like soldering electronic gizmos together in their garage are still around, just doing different things. A surprising number of the amatuer guitar builders are techies, for instance. There's a whole lot of awesome stuff left to build, so I don't think that people are hanging up their soldering irons yet.
Steve
Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:2, Insightful)
My thinking is that the DIY people of this century will be working almost entirely in software. After all, the open source community is really just a community of DIYs.
Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:4, Informative)
How old are these EE's? I'm a 28-year-old EE, and I'm the only EE I know who was into electronics before getting his degree (and still is a little). In fact, I'm the only EE I know who has any technical hobbies whatsoever (electronics, auto mechanics, OSS programming, Linux, etc.). And I work at a certain really huge processor manufacturer, where I'm surrounded by EE's (though none of them are over ~33).
Trust me, for most engineers, engineering is just a way to make money, not something they do out of any huge interest in electronics. And if you're really interested in electronics and are considering getting into electrical engineering, don't. You'll be severely disappointed. I was.
Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:2)
Re:A Bygone Era? Probably not. (Score:3, Insightful)
With the loss of the Amateur Scientist column along with Connections (my two favorites), I find little left in the magazine (excluding the usual hand-waving fluff) to keep me coming back. I let my subscription lapse 6 months ago; every once in a while, I'll browse the monthly copy at the local B&N, but I have yet to find a compelling reason to buy.
Meanwhile my home-built gravimeter sits quietly on the shelf, recording local feline Tachyon emissions...
Those Electronic Kits (Score:2)
Anyone?
Re:Those Electronic Kits (Score:2, Funny)
A: Radio Shack.
Re:Those Electronic Kits - Jameco (Score:2)
If I remember right, Jameco's online site only has a subset of their inventory. For maximum browsing enjoyment, get their dead-tree catalog.
Great company, highly recommended. I've ordered from them on and off since I was in high school, way back in the 70's. (That's back when people still played with electronics as a hobby, and Edmund Scientific had some of the coolest, most exotic stuff I'd ever seen.)
*DigiKey and Mouser are more focused on commercial users, but they're great sources for hard-to-find parts, or a specific variant of a part.
Re:Those Electronic Kits - Jameco (Score:2)
Re:Those Electronic Kits - Jameco (Score:2)
Re:Those Electronic Kits (Score:2)
I picked up two mini echo mixer kits for I think $8.00 each. The cool thing about it is that the
Kits include two chips that are no longer being manufactured and as such to buy one of these chip,
if you can find them will set you back $25.00
I'll be modifying them to give me more effect than echo, like flanging and chorus.
I also picked up a portable CD amp kit for really cheap.
What am I gonna be using this stuff for?
I made my own electric violin and Am making the case and electronic too.
It looks really good and sounds good too. Now all I got to do is learn to play it.
:)
Re:Those Electronic Kits (Score:2)
Try Elenco [elenco.com]. I got a little kit to make a "clapper" (a led lights up when you clap). The box said I'd learn everything I needed to know as I went along, but I ended up just soddering everything together like it said and not actually learning much of anything. It was fun though. They have a phone bug kit that I want to get for sampling phone conversations. Everyone and his mother samples answering maching tapes, but I want the actual conversation! Anyways, I wound up getting Charles Ryan's "Basic Electricity" book, which has since taught me a lot.
obvious (Score:2)
A telescope or a radio, perhaps, but it's still cheaper to build a computer youself, especially with free operating systems rather than $200+ ones.
Re:obvious (Score:2)
I can personally vouch for the radio. It is MUCH cheaper to buy a cheap little AM/FM radio than to build one. Try running down to Radio Shack and buying up all the parts you need to build a decent-sounding radio for under $10 (breadboard or circuit board, it really doesn't matter).
However, a good electronics technician has the ability to take an old broken stereo, yank all the good parts, and throw together a working model for a fraction of the cost of buying one. But then again, they generally end up looking something like this [seattlerobotics.org].
Re:obvious (Score:2)
What you're talking about is ASSEMBLING a computer from pre-built components. That's like ordering french fries at a restaurant, pouring ketchup on them, then bragging about how you cooked them yourself.
Re:obvious (Score:2)
Tim
Re:obvious (Score:2)
Still, not being able to do a a decent pcb hurts. I'm trying to figure that one out. I'm thinking something along the lines of this. Someone like me (several someones is better than just me) spends the cash for a high end hobbyist pcb shop. Nothing quite professional, but enough to do nice surface mount quality boards, double-sided. I'm figuring the cost at something like $2000 for me, spread out over a period of months. Now, there are lots of things I want to build, and possibly even sell... but the designs will be some variant of open source. Now, if you have something you want to build, but can't afford $200 for a prototype pcb, you just open source it, through me. I send you a finished pcb at (or maybe even a little below, all depending) cost... you get something, we all get something. I can only design so much myself, so I get lots of help from people wanting other stuff... and we all get to buy or build hardware that the big corps would never make for us.
Winners all around. Besides, I trick people into proof-reading all my crappy designs.
Re:obvious (Score:2)
Granted, "building a computer" is easier than it was 25 years ago, but you can't build your own motherboard with 20-odd conductive layers at home either. If you want to build a computer using a simple microprocessor you still can... it just won't be quite as useful as it once was.
And I would dare say that Linux is enough of a hobbyist OS in some senses that learning all its ins and outs is just as challening and scientifically inventive as building an Altair was.
Re:obvious (Score:2)
Homebuilding a PC today would cost far more in parts alone than buying a cheap clone at Walmart. Add to that the massive task of custom-designing hardware to run a modern CPU, memory, and IO, and you're talking _loads_ of work.
Is it even possible? One could always recreate an old Altair project, but could a talented engineer homebuild a Pentium-based machine? Or is the support logic implicitly so complex that it must be implemented with custom chipsets?
Re:obvious (Score:2)
but could a talented engineer homebuild a Pentium-based machine?
I think it would probably be possible. What makes computers so complex is making them fast, not making them at all. It probably wouldn't be hard to TTL yourself a simple microcode assembly language, which would implement the Pentium instruction set. Just don't expect any speed records.
You would probably also want to use standard I/O chips. It would probably would be pretty hard to implement a home-brew IDE controller, although it may not be as hard as I think if you will were willing to do some sort of software implementation on your home-brew CPU.
It would be an amusing project. I wonder why more people don't do it for the hell of it. Anyone know of any projects like this?
Re:obvious (Score:2)
That reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago from a guy who once worked at a place that sold oscilliscope "kits". They'd buy cheap fully assembled scopes from Japan, carefully disassemble them, and package them up as do-it-yourself kits for hobbyists.
I don't know about the rest of you (Score:2)
For pre-built machines, tech support is usually pretty crummy (I can troubleshoot my own hardware problems, thank you very much), and everything is integrated on board. Sound card dies? Send the whole system in for repairs for a month to get it fixed. Personally, I'd rather just yank the SoundBlaster out of my machine and buy another, and install it in the same day.
Don't get me wrong, pre-built machines have their place, but for the hardcore computer technicians, it is certainly not in their own home.
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:2)
I think the general population lacks the ability to analyze risks vs. rewards situations. Risk? About $800. Reward? You're smart now. If that's not enough for the average human to tackle new exciting things, I'm a bit concerned about where society is going.
And on another issue, the parallel port is going to totally die soon unless we geeks keep dinking with it! Fire up those LEDs, minions! Okay, glad I got that out.
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:2)
Actually, if I may throw in a comment here... for me, many times, it is about the money. I can buy a pre-built decent quality machine for around $2,000. Or, I can take the machine I have right now, spend a couple hundred bucks on a new motherboard and processor, and have the same power of the $2,000 machine, with better quality (I know, because I hand-picked all the components myself!).
What do I do with the old mobo and processor? Buy a cheap-ass empty case and throw it in, toss in some other components I've got laying around, and sell it to someone in my family for a few hundred bucks, with Linux and Windows both preinstalled.
End cost for me? Usually negative! How much time did I spend doing all of that work? A few hours, but, I wouldn't call it work. "Work is what you do when you'd rather be doing something else." There's really nothing I'd rather be doing than yanking out PCI cards and troubleshooting USB devices.
Oh, and on the parallel port thing, I don't use my parallel port on my main computer, but my workstation and laptop like to talk via parallel null-modem cable. A lot cheaper than buying a new laptop with eth0 installed (it's a Compaq LTE Elite 4/40CX, 486/40Mhz with 20Mb of RAM. The thing rocks the DOS games, baby!)
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:2)
You cheap bastard!
Re:I don't know about the rest of you (Score:2)
Tim
Telescope-building is not astronomy (Score:3, Informative)
I forget who said it, but it bears repeating: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It's the same thing. If my friend's interests were with tinkering with lenses and long metal tubes, he'd be doing that.
If there were some special need he had that no manufacturer met, some special lens he needed, maybe this would be an issue. But companies stay in business by providing what their customers want. Especially when their customers are chiefly hobbyists.
Re:Telescope-building is not astronomy (Score:2)
Second, you're exactly right that telescope building is much different than astronomy. I'm in the Austin Astronomical Society, and we've got a few scope builders in the club. Trouble is, they hardly come to the meetings, and they don't bring their scopes. At the observing field, we can have more than 50 scopes on a clear summer night, and 99% of those are various commercial scopes: Meades, Celestrons, Obsessions, various small commercial dobs. By and large, these telescopes cost less than what it would take to build a similar instrument. Perhaps the best deals available right now are the 10 inch dobs. Meade makes a good one for less than $500 I believe.
Orion Telescopes makes the best one available for $599 -link here [telescope.com]. At those prices, there's absolutely no reason at all for an amateur to build their own telescope. 20 or 30 years ago, many people built their own scopes because a quality 10 inch reflector would cost approximately what a brand new car cost. That's all changed, and astronomy has become a lot more open to newcomers.
the end of telescope building? I don't agree. (Score:2, Informative)
You can build a telescope mostly from parts you find at a dumpster: some pieces of wood for the base, a cardboard tube, a piece of glass... Take a look at the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers [sfsidewalk...nomers.org]' website, for example.
People have made high-quality optical paraboloidal mirrors from scrap glass, glass candle holders, trepanned discs cut from CRT-tubes, etcetera. I have ground and polished a 7" glass disc into a shape which surface deviates no more than 40 nanometer from an ideal paraboloid. All this takes is a lot of time and patience, and some basic materials. Remember: the first telescopes were built 300 years ago.
The Amateur Telescope Making community is very much alive, try a google query [google.com] with these words.
If you're interested in building a telescope, optionally including grinding and polishing your own optics, join the Amateur Telescope Makers mailing list [attbi.com].
seems to me... (Score:2, Insightful)
In Related News... (Score:2)
Some folks at Extreme Tech [extremetech.com] also said that DIY computers will be dead [extremetech.com] with more or less the same reasons. Is this a trend or what?
Re:In Related News... (Score:2)
They're dead already. Its just a matter of snapping together pre-built modules. Sure more stuff will get built onto the motherboard, but thats been happening for a while. Remember when you had to get a seperate IO card for serial/parallel ports, IDE, floppy, etc.?
Either way its a far cry from soldering your own system together.
Re:In Related News... (Score:2)
Tim
Re:In Related News... (Score:2)
I didn't say otherwise. Even with ancient technology its certainly beyond MY feeble means. But I think people who put their own systems together from OEM parts need to understand how little it is that we are really doing. Its not that different from buying a box from Dell or whoever (aside from saving money, that is).
Home laboratories. (Score:4, Funny)
It of course has nothing to do with Ecstasy at all.
What? the DanceSafe Bumper stickers? Um.. i just, uh.. support their cause and all. That's all. Excuse me, i have to go now.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Radio Shack has become a crappy Best Buy (Score:2)
I have a Radio Shack a block away from my house, and every time I go in, it's an educational experience.
For them.
I have to explain the difference between ether cable and telephone wiring.
Um. I don't need any help. I know your store better than you do. :P
Re:Radio Shack has become a crappy Best Buy (Score:2)
Re:Radio Shack has become a crappy Best Buy (Score:2)
Can't even find the audio cables I need and when I patchwork what they have together.... it don't work due to shoddy manufacturing.
They used to be alot better.
Re:Radio Shack has become a crappy Best Buy (Score:2)
Breadboards? At $20 each (when they sold 'em) don't even get me started...
If you're lucky you can sometimes get switches there.
Does it _really_ cost that much to have an inventory of these penny-parts that they can't afford to stock them?
Re:Radio Shack has become a crappy Best Buy (Score:2)
What you said. I do most of my shopping at surplus electronics stores, but there are still a few (a very few) Radio Shacks that are true to the faith.
My old town:
Very much the stereotypical "You've got questions, we've got blank stares" kind of store.
My new town:
Me: [reluctantly goes into RS, hey, it's nearby and I might get lucky and save myself a long drive... yay, I find the parts!]
RS guy: [seeing one of those little 600-ohm telephone transformers and some 10M resistors] So - buildin' a radio or a line finder?
Me: Line finder. Hangin' a painting in a new apartment, but yeah, once I find where my wiring is, I oughta build a crystal radio, I haven't done that since I was a kid - HEY! This is isn't supposed to happen at Radio Shack!
RS guy: (Laughs) - Yeah, there aren't many of us left who still build for the fun of it.
Me: You said it. Nice to see there's still some of us left - you wouldn't happen to know where I could get a $PARTNUM for the vertical deflection on $TV_MODEL, would you? (/me shows datasheet)
RS guy: (nodding) I've seen that - very common failure mode with that set. (/he points at a cap on the reference design page). Usually this cap has dried out, which takes out the deflection amp. We don't have the amp, but [gives name/address of local TV repair guy about 3 blocks away] does. If it's more the amp or the caps, he also does good work.
We talked shop for a few minutes after that, basically the same things as this Slashdot thread, namely that disposable/replacable modules and the shift to SMT and ASICs made repair work easier (swap modules) and electronics cheaper and better -- but that the price was that it was gonna be very hard for anyone starting from scratch to ever "learn it all from scratch" anymore. You can cobble together some neat stuff with TTL and discrete components, but there's a huge jump in cost and learning curve to get from there to playing with, say, FPGAs.
But hey, a couple of days later, I had the picture safely attached to the wall without fear of nailing through a live wire, the TV was fixed, and that Shack had a customer for life.
Sigh - Fry's has changed ... (Score:2)
To be fair PCI has a lot to do with it - too much overhead in the bus interface - before the advent of pci you could wirewrap a NuBus or ISA card with a few jelly-beans
History of the column (Score:4, Interesting)
A Brief History of
"The Amateur Scientist"
Albert Ingalls
"The Amateur Scientist" traces its pedigree to 1928, when famed astronomer Albert Ingalls began the column as "The Backyard Astronomer." Ingalls told amateurs how they could get personally involved in astronomy by building professional-quality instruments and carry out cutting-edge observations. Eventually Ingalls chose to broaden the column's scope to include "how-to's" from all fields of science. When he did, he also changed the department's name to "The Amateur Scientist."
C. L. Stong
Ingalls wrote his column for almost 30 years. When he died in 1954 the publisher selected C. L. Stong to continue the feature. Stong was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse and a master tinkerer who brilliantly extended the column, frequently peppering it with extremely sophisticated projects including home-built lasers and atom smashers. Many working professional scientists say that they first got hooked on science through Stong's amazing columns.
In 1960 Stong compiled a book titled The Amateur Scientist, (Simon and Schuster) the only collection of articles that has ever been published from this column. However, limited to paper and ink, Stong could only fit in 57 projects. Despite being only a partial anthology, never being advertised in Scientific American , and appearing long before the rise of home schooling, Stong's book sold over 10,000 copies. It went out of print in 1972 and is much sought after today by amateur scientists.
Jearl Walker
Stong ran the department for over 20 years until he died in 1977. In 1978, Scientific American hired Jearl Walker, Ph.D. to take over. Walker had caught the publisher's attention thanks to The Flying Circus of Physics, a book Walker wrote which highlighted the fascinating physics of the everyday world. Under Walker's stewardship "The Amateur Scientist" presented fewer how-to projects, and instead focused on the physics of common phenomena. Walker's columns are still frequently consulted by educators and students alike.
Walker resigned from Scientific American in 1990 after 12 years. Collectively, Ingalls, Stong and Walker account for 90 percent of all articles.
Forrest Mims
After Walker left, Scientific American decided to rededicate the column to hands-on projects and so they hired Forrest Mims III, a renowned writer of books for Radio Shack and an accomplished amateur scientist. They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins. Not wanting to be perceived as supporting Creationism, Scientific American fired Mims. Mims charged religious discrimination and the story was carried through most major US news outlets.
Although the incident didn't diminish Scientific American's commitment to the column, it did make them gun-shy about hiring another amateur scientist to write it. But professionals tend to be too narrowly focused in their own disciplines. The publisher invited many potential columnists to submit individual articles, and most of these were published under "The Amateur Scientist." But the magazine was unable to find anyone with both professional credentials and the incredible breadth of science knowledge necessary to recapture the popularity the column enjoyed under Stong and Ingalls. And without a regular columnist, the department languished, appearing only sporadically between 1990 and 1995. Most Scientific American readers stopped looking for it when they got a new magazine.
Shawn Carlson
In 1995 the editorial staff discovered the Society for Amateur Scientists. It's Founder and Executive Director was Dr. Shawn Carlson, a physicist and established science writer who had left academe a year earlier to devote his career to helping amateur scientists. Dr. Carlson took over the column in November of that year and immediately returned the column's focus to cutting-edge projects that amateurs can do inexpensively at home. Today, over 1 million Scientific American readers turn to "The Amateur Scientist" every month. The column has never been more popular.
Forrest Mims and SciAm (Score:3, Interesting)
This is actually a pretty sad story [uh.edu]. Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They certainly guaranteed that at least one agnostic (myself) will never burden their subscription department with correspondence.
Re:Forrest Mims and SciAm (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed on the latter, but I disagree vehemently on the former.
Taking Forrest Mims' little paperbacks at Radio Shack for example -- the laws that govern electronics are the same whether God slacked off for six days and pulled an all nighter, or if evolution is correct.
I fail to see the relevance of his unscientific beliefs with regards to biology if he's writing a column of hands-on science projects. Sometimes smart people make mistakes outside of their area of expertise.
A similar example would be that of Linus Pauling (winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for chemistry). It appears that Linus Pauling was just plain wrong [quackwatch.com] about vitamin C. This in no way invalidates his other outstanding work as a chemist.
The difference is that Pauling wasn't raked over the coals for being wrong about one particular thing, and Mims was. IMNSHO, so long as Mims kept his creationist beliefs out of his electronics columns (and I can't imagine any project which would require us knowing about them :-), Mims' treatment was unjust.
Re:Forrest Mims and SciAm (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, maybe not. I used that term because as scientists in the public eye, the editors of a major, consumer-accessible science magazine have a special obligation to behave in a way that's above reproach, scientifically speaking. When they fail to do so in such a blatant manner, it's at least a potential "atrocity" on the Pons and Fleischmann scale -- an event with substantial negative implications for the reputation of science as a whole.
Heck, one of the three inventors of the transistor was practically a card-carrying Nazi, but that didn't stop the Nobel Committee from awarding them their justly-earned physics prize. If a committee with a substantial contingent of Jews and ethnic minorities could deal with a certified asshole like Shockley, it wasn't unreasonable for the SciAm editors to do the same for a man who, in addition to being a well-known and popular science writer, has a reputation as a decent, agreeable, and generally unlikely-to-embarrass-his-associates fellow.
Forrest Mims (Score:4, Insightful)
I would not take Mims seriously speaking as a creationist or Intelligent Designer or whatever they are going to call it next week. However, I take him very very seriously when it comes to electronics. Fair is fair, and there is nothing inappropriate about recognizing his electronics competence.
SciAm tarnished themselves by not recognizing this and gave creationists one hell of a talking point. Shame on them.
Wrong! (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't buy one of these! Actually
FIY (fix it yourself) is also in decline (Score:3, Insightful)
The scale of economics in building consumer devices in 3rd world countries is so great that it isn't really worth the cost of having them repaired. It's often cheaper to buy an new one, and even if it isn't the new features available in the latest devices still make it worthwhile.
Re:FIY (fix it yourself) is also in decline (Score:2)
Audio equipment manufacturers. Both my Mackie mixer and my Fender amp came with circuit diagrams. They're not much good to me now, but hopefully sooner or later I'll know enough about the stuff to be able to fix or tweak them myself. The Mackie even gives you instructions on how to do a couple basic hacks! I've also heard that a lot of people who go to music school build their own amps and speakers.
Re:FIY (fix it yourself) is also in decline (Score:2)
Of course it isn't complete though. The other day I started to vacuum the basement. The cleaner wasn't picking up much, so I examined the underside. The roller had a lot of threads and hair and stuff stuck to it. So I started to clean it. While I was cleaning it, the belt came off right in my hand. It had snapped, which explained why it wasn't working very well. I had never serviced a vacuum cleaner before. I examined the plastic cover, and much to my delight it was designed to snap off with the aid of a flat-bladed screwdriver. There were even handly little pictograms cast into the plastic that showed you where to pry. Once I had the motor shaft exposed, I knew I could replace the belt--if only I could find the right part. Here's the good part. I went to Fischer's Hardware [springfield.va.us]. Not only is DIY and the mom-n-pop hardware store not dead, the mom-n-pop hardware store with no web presence of its own and nothing more than a listing with the chamber of commerce is not dead either. Fischer's has been in Springfield as long as I can remember, and I can remember a lot longer than I care to say. But wait, it gets better. Fischer's staff, unlike the huge box store staff, is always helpful. So I was not the least bit reluctant to walk in there with a broken belt and get either a replacement or a referral to someone who had a replacement (they referred for the fan motor for our bathroom). The guy in the vacuum department didn't have an official Hoover parts guide. When I said "do you need the model number" he gave me this look and said "don't get me started on model numbers". He took out some similar sized belts and started comparing them. When he found a close match, he handed me a Eureka belt and said "You can try this, and if it doesn't work use the yellow pages, get the part number from the mfct..." In other words, what I was too lazy to do in the first place and went to Fischer's to avoid doing. You can't get real-world expertise, honesty, and common sense like that from Home Depot. The belt was $2.18 and well... I had a coupon for $2.00. This was a no-brainer. Not having to track down a "genuine hoover part" was worth an $0.18 gamble. So I bought the little belt, got it home, and installed it. It was a little wider than the original belt, but it fit. The cleaner works fine now. I ran it for a good 15 minutes and there was no smoke or anything. Hopefully this fix will last, and even if it only lasts a few months I will happily buy another belt from the vacuum-cleaner hacker at Fischer's. That might cost more in the short run, but if Fischer's ever went away it would be a priceless loss.
Re:FIY (fix it yourself) is also in decline (Score:2)
The only thing I won't mess with are TVs/Monitors, cause I've heard too many horror stories about dastardly amounts of electricity seeking escape through the unfortunate amateur repairman.
Tim
Muscle wire and super-magnets (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually been doing more hobby stuff lately. Having more disposable income than your average kid makes a difference. Another difference nowadays is the greater variety of cool gadgets available and the Internet for obtaining them. I actually took time out of my busy weekend to build a flashlight out of super-magnets, some copper wire, and a couple white LEDs. To see the plans, look here [creative-science.org.uk]. Next weekend, I think I'll do something with muscle wire [robotbooks.com]. Oh, and those 100 ball bearings I just won on eBay, just wait and see...
It's also present in the software field (Score:2)
Those listings, despite being a pain to enter and debug, taught me most of my early programming and software design knowledge before I formally learned it in school, and probably did so for others.
Now, none of the general mags have software you can program yourself. Not even the programmer mags like Dr. Dobbs journal have full working apps anymore, just little code snippets.
Anyone else miss those days?
Autocoding is an open and ready field (Score:2)
It's not that we don't know what the collection of functionality needed is to make this possible on a broad scale, from typicaly users to hard core autocoders...
for a beginning point of autocoding [mindpsring.com] See the nine action constants
This is a field really open for fresh blood as the old blood has to much vested interest in the way things are done and also to set in their ways.
Where autocoding can be found in industry is in areospace. Funny but you'd think it would be more kitchen table and evolve from there. Perhaps that suggest it's time to bring it to the kitchen table.
It's not that kitchen table scientist have slowed, but more a matter of what to explore and experiment with next, as it's clear alot has already been done to the point of cheap throwaway stuff what what we have had on the kitchen table in the not so distant past.
We just need new subject matter to deal with. Autocoding and user level automation is ready.
Ironic of Sciam... (Score:2, Interesting)
Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist" (Score:4, Interesting)
That sucker never saw my friend's house again -- the stuff you could make was incredible, and clearly from a time before anyone thought about suing authors for writing potentially injurous copy.
You could build (I kid you not):
(The latter, now that I think of it, would make a great case-cooling system. Gotta go to the garage and find that book...
Re:Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist" (Score:2)
Isn't this how they started off in October Sky? [imdb.com]
Re:Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist" (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, you have a cylinder with both ends sealed off, on each end you attach a narrow length of pipe, one tube has a large hole goin through into the cylinder, the other has a smaller hole, slightly smaller. Both of these holes are axially placed. Now you add another tube to the side of cylinder, but placed so that it enters at a tangent, this also has a hole into the cylinder.
Now force air into the tube on the side, as the air is injected tangentally to the cylinder, the air will swirl around around it eventually gets to the center. Pressure variations inside the cylinder will seperate the air into hot and cold, hot will come out of one pipe and cold the other.
This device will also produce a strange noise, any attempt to cancel this noise will stop the device from functioning.
Further details can be found Here [amasci.com]
I have been considering using this in a cooling mod but as my parents complain enough about the current noise, I don't think I'll push my luck any further. Besides, steps need to be taken to handle condensation on the cold tube.
Building the device to ideal measurements will get you some very cold air:
>compressed air at room temperature (20 C) could
>in principle be cooled to about -258 C, a mere
>15 degrees above absolute zero! (The
>corresponding temperature of the hot side would
>have been 80
>C.)
Re:Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist" (Score:3, Informative)
Thats a Hilsch Vortex Tube. A friend of mine made one out of brass in college. (This back when a computer maintenance shop required a lathe.) It works, but it's an inefficient refrigerator. The basic idea is to centrifugally separate fast-moving and slow-moving atoms, like Maxwell's Daemon. It doesn't violate conservation of energy, although the proof of that is involved.
Re:Mourning the death of "The Amateur Scientist" (Score:2)
I have an similar book myself but meant for a younger group - I'm not sure how far back it dates, but I think it was my Dad's as a kid - "101 things a boy can do".
I can't remember too many of them , but for example one of the 101 things a boy can do is make a paper volcano that spews forth hot "lava" made out of some nasty toxic mercury compound that I guess pharmacists were happy to sell to young boys back then.
Even not so complex is not possible anymore. (Score:3, Informative)
Or the (un)availability of not-so-complex devices. (1)
It's easier to make a funny thing with a cheap Motorola 6800 or a Zilog Z80 than with a Intel586 or AMD K7. Both for the hardware side (it's only 40 pins and 2MHz) as for the software side (just a couple of registers).
Also, how "easy" is it these days to add an self-developped extensionboard into your computer? The P2000T and MSX had some nice eurocard extension-slots with an easy to use bus. Heck, you even got the full specifications of everything when you bought the computer.
(1) When I told this on IRC some people responded that I still can mail-order Z80s for AUS$ 20,- (same price as the i386
Re:Even not so complex is not possible anymore. (Score:2)
Re:Even not so complex is not possible anymore. (Score:3, Informative)
You can buy a host of programmable microcontrollers from a variety of vendors; check Digikey's catalog for a sampling. Many of these should adequately substitute for a Z80.
Also, how "easy" is it these days to add an self-developped extensionboard into your computer?
Not that hard.
I was building a project driven off of a parallel port a couple of weeks back. These won't go away for a few years yet, and you can clock them as slowly as you want to.
You can also still find motherboards with ISA slots for new machines; at 8 MHz or so, you could certainly put something together with a microcontroller and discrete logic that would fit in a standard system.
If parallel ports and ISA slots disappear down the road... there will be legacy support for the 10 MBit version of USB for quite a while, and the controller for that is simple enough that you could easily build one with a microcontroller and some glue logic.
In summary, I don't think there will be a problem any time soon.
The DIY spirit is still alive for this guy... (Score:4, Interesting)
He almost turned his backyard into a federal toxic waste site, and shortened his life by 5 years or so, but hey, it almost worked!
Re:The DIY spirit is still alive for this guy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, yes... the infamous "Radioactive Boy Scout."
He even made Slashdot [slashdot.org] nearly a year ago.
Back then, he was enlisted in the Navy... If I figure right, his first term should be up by now. Anyone have a status update for us? How's he doing? (Pathwalker [slashdot.org], perhaps you have an inside track? You went to high school with him... [slashdot.org])
Certainly one of the dirtier home science projects... at least from a radiological point of view. Look on the bright side, though: At least he got help cleaning it up!
Re:The DIY spirit is still alive for this guy... (Score:2)
I apologize for giving anything away from the above article, but I don't understand why he wasn't recruited into some of the nation's top research labs doing positive things for society. Hell, I'd put him in a research lab with gobs of funding doing whatever the hell he wants....
Intelligence is a terrible thing to waste.
I disagree. (Score:5, Informative)
dobplans [aol.com]
Build Your Own 4 Inch Dobsonian Telescope [lymax.com]
Telescope Making [efn.org]
Dobsonian Evolution [aol.com]
Small Dob Web Site [bellsouth.net]
I built my own Dobsonian!! [moonlightsys.com]
Re:I disagree. (Score:2)
I'd also love to get into alternative power, but my property is filled with tall trees, meaning I can use neither solar panels (shade) nor wind turbines (turbulence).
The city has turned me into a collector, not a creator.
Re:I disagree. (Score:3, Interesting)
There are more manufacturers out there, now. That's a good thing since people who don't have the time can at least get in the hobby and even contribute to science.
And anyone who complains they aren't into astronomy because they live in the city and have to deal with light pollution, doesn't understand the hobby, the science and the technology completely.
You can build your own telescope, your own CCD camera [willbell.com], and a cheap PC to run it and do some great science [homestead.com] and take some great pretty pictures [highenergyastro.com] all from a very light polluted area.
Re:I disagree. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll concede that there are lots of people buying telescopes today compared with what there were a while ago, but as someone who's on the organising committee of an astronomical society, most of the people I see doing this are people who wouldn't have had one at all some time ago. The main reason they purchased a cheap telescope from a dealer, who incidently knew nothing about astronomy or telescopes, is because they also knew very little about astronomy. There are occasional exceptions, but when you buy a cheap telescope, you're usually sacrificing quality optics, and many who joined the society later discovered that the they'd purchased wasn't everything they wanted in the end.
On the other hand, nearly everyone who obtained a telescope after being a member for a few months has found it much more economical to either build their own, or have someone else do it. This doesn't mean they always do, because sometimes people want a more expensive commercial scope for doing more advanced stuff. There's so much you can do with a homebuilt dobsonian though, that most people have one at some point.
The seven or eight telescope building experts in the region probably each know more about telescope building than all of the commercial dealers put together. In most cases, they're in their own part time business of grinding high quality mirrors (or lenses) which they on-sell to amateur astronomers keen on building the rest of the scope themselves. People go to them because they provide higher quality equipment than most cheap machine-made equipment.
Soldering Surface Mount isn't that hard. (Score:3, Informative)
I've always found that working with SMT is easier than through hole. You have gravity on your side. It will hold the component on the pad while you tack it in place.
Just use a decent soldering iron that has a small enough tip and don't make the mistake of using too small a tip. A too small tip doesn't hold enough heat to flow the solder onto larger SMT pins.
Also make good use of brush on flux and desolder braid. They are your friends when reworking SMT boards.
When laying out your own PCB, SMT components let you get away with drilling far fewer holes and zero ohm resistors let you 'jump' over tracks without using vias.
When it comes to probing, all your signals are generally available on one side. Most SMT parts (except BGA and LCC styles) don't shroud their leads like stand-up electrolytics and transistors do.
One of the primary barriers to messing with this sort of stuff in America is the crappiness of component supply for the hobbyist. I have yet to see anything that comes close to the likes of Radio Spares or Farnell in the UK.
Re:Soldering Surface Mount isn't that hard. (Score:2)
lawyers got in the way. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Sorry can't sell you that, could be used to make illegal drugs." or "Sorry we don't sell that; you could get hurt and sue us." and "We use to sell that but can't anymore, forbids it."
And let's not forget the ever-present terrorist threat. Anyone with chemicals in their household more elaborate than vinegar must be working with terrorists.
I don't believe so. (Score:2, Interesting)
One example was the 802.11 wireless standard, how over the last few years what was considered junk bandwidth was embraced by radio hobbiests and made cheap by innovative manufacturing.
I believe that while the economy was good, everyone had a "look what I can get for free" mentality. Now that we've seen the downturn, I believe we see a more "What cool things can I do with the tech I already have" attitude.
I know presonally I've found myself doing that recently.
So to say DIY is dead, I believe it was hibernating, and it's about to wake back up for spring.
Working with surface mount devices (Score:2)
Soldering irons will just barely work. [avocetsystems.com] Reliable work requires a hot-air soldering station, with a set of air guides for every shape of chip you're dealing with. And you probably have to take a soldering course to get your skills up to par.
Last year, I finally gave up hardware and boxed up the electronics tools and parts.
Not just science.... (Score:2)
Now-a-days, macros are hived off to another area, and we're supposed to learn VirusBasic for Applications, and their woofy interface and use long commands like "CallApplicationFunctionInExcel()" in order to do any automation.
Basically, I just leave VBA for the script kiddies now. Never could make head nor tail of it.
On the other hand, leave me alone with some REXX and a ascii format, and since it's my baby, I understand it and make it do nice things.
Still, my hobbyist science is plowing into new world research :), so there's plenty of noonosphere to claim.
Amateur radio (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would people trade images with SSTV (slow scan TV, basically a codec for TV-resolution images sent over the radio) when they can email jpegs? For the most part, the people who do it are just in it for entertainment, not utility.
There is still room for tweaking; in fact, the amateur radio community strongly encourages it. Radios still usually come with complete schematics (pages and pages of schematics, in the case of some of the larger units in the local radio club's shack). But it's pretty uncommon to pull out the soldering iron these days and work on the actual equipment.
Better or worse? Neither. There will always be a small segment of the population that finds any given field (astronomy, radio, etc) exciting. New technology will just change their focus, but the interest is unlikely to go away.
-John, KG4RUO
Re:Amateur radio (Score:2, Informative)
The receiver section in the Red Hot 20 I just built pretty much holds it own or kicks the crap out of anything that is commercial. The designer just kicked butt. Plus, I learned a ton about RF electronics.
[redhotradio.com]
Red Hot Radio
Plus don't get me started about the K2. High performance direct conversion receiver that has some serious mojo....and I'm going build it next!! yeehaw!!
[elecraft.com]
K2 and Elecraft site
Go check out the QRP guys. Get on QRP-L or just go through the archives on the web. Those guys are just RF ninja masters (well, at least a few of them).
The commercial guys never get it. They want to build stuff that is all things to all people.
Melt Solder!!!
Snort Rosin!!!
Difficulty is relative... (Score:3, Insightful)
> with a soldering iron at your kitchen table?
> Don't!!)
Why not?
I just soldered a couple of surface mount memory chips into my Tivo. Sure, the days of using a $12 Radio Shack soldering iron are long gone, but there are inexpensive Weller soldering irons that are well suited to todays ambitions hobiest.
Telling someone not to make that surface mount repair is adding to the very problem you are complaining about. Don't encourage people to be afraid to experiment and learn. You may not be able to make that repair, but that doesn't mean someone else can't.
-Chris
Not completely gone... (Score:2, Insightful)
The essential learning aspect of the hobbyist modality is captured pretty well by the LEGO Mindstorms robotics toys(?). While it's true that machine language is a lost art, as is the construction of simple electronic devices, there are new frontiers available today that were not practical in days gone by.
Maybe in another decade or two we'll have do-it-yourself genetic tinkering...
DIY is very much alive here at /. (Score:2, Informative)
I have however, see more interesting DIY here at
What is more DIY than building your own No click mouse [slashdot.org] or how about Mini PCs w/o fans [slashdot.org]?
Admittedly you won't see the actual plans hosted on
Anytime you wanna see DIY just go to the Hardware [slashdot.org] section.
It's right under your nose (which is under your CRT bloodshot eyes)
It has always been (Score:2, Interesting)
It has always been cheaper to buy things like radios than to make them. Otherwise people would make them and sell them for less than the market price, and the market price would go down.
Cheaply available components that result from better manufacturing methods etc. allow children and hobbyists to perform more complex experiments and create more elaborate designs than was ever possible before.
If you get yourself a programmable logic developper's kit, you can design, with the same tools as professionals, anything from internet routers to microcomputers to cell phones and just abotu anything your heart desires, including specialized scientific analysis equipement.
try: http://www.latticesemi.com/
They also provide an analog version. wiring a digital and an analog programmable device together gives you the flexibility to design just about any sub-100 Mhz device out there. Heck I'm sure you could procure some old schematics for ancient CPU's and actaully make them yourself.
Build a breeder reactor in your shed (Score:2, Interesting)
Now how can you honestly say D.I.Y. is dead when young boy scouts are still doing things like this for their badges =)
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/n1782_v297
(on a serious note, I agree with the article - and it's a very sad trend to see happen)
Monorails, Web Sites, and Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
I think D.Y.I is alive and well, just in a different form. Yes, I grew up in the late '60s and early '70s fixing TV's, scavenging electronics parts from the dumpster of the local electronics store (yes, there were more than just Radio Shacks selling electronic components back then), and building my own transmitters, receivers, and light organs (anyone remember those!).
As much as I've tried to interest my son and his friends in doing these things, they're just not as interested in these kinds of things. Instead, they designs web pages for their teachers, write computer programs to do everything from keeping track of homework to helping practice martial arts, fix computers for their friends, and of course, play lots of games (not all computer, they play chess too). My son also wants to build a zero-emission solar-charged electric go-kart; in my day a simple gas powered one would have sufficed - we didn't care much about pollution or fuel economy back then.
The point is that the economics and complexity of electronic equipment has changed the types of things that modern hobbyists are interested in, but it has not eliminated the urge for people to experement with new things. Hobbyists are now more interested in solving larger, more global technical problems rather than the simpler gadgets we used to build. How this will change things in the long term, I don't know. When I was studying for my EE degree 25-30 years ago, many of my classmates were people who had tinkered extensively with electronics when they were younger. Today, I imagine that's not the case, but OTOH in computer science classes, there are probably *more* previous tinkerers than in the 'old days'; 30 years ago it was rare for someone to have had experience with anything more than a calculator in high school.
As for open source, the trend for a lot of hobbyist activity to occur in software areas can only help.
I had wanted to build an open source programmer (Score:2)
Opencores (Score:2, Interesting)
bit-based experiments everywhere! (Score:2, Insightful)
We're not all building Ham radios and grinding our own telescope lenses, but that's because we're so busy building our own aparatus for whatever interests us using the building blocks of the digital generation. 90% of my projects have nearly nothing to do with pre-1970's devices.
And when something DOES?-- well, ten seconds after I got my first Dobsonian 'scope, I began thinking how cool it'd be to rig it up with photocells, servos, a database and a real-time webserver so I could stargaze last night's sky any time I wanted (like at lunch!?). And two-thirds of how I'd do that isn't available from Edmunds. What's more, ten more seconds of searching on google (webcam astronomer) got me two such devices already implemented.
Folks are building their own fuel cells and hooking 'em to bikes [mhtx.com], making wireless network antennas, turbocharged generators, stereo-to-PC integration devices, in-car-computers, personal VTOL aircraft [moller.com], and more!
We're all still experimenting. That's what hacking is, in my book. We're just caught up in 'new' areas of discovery.
Oh, and Open Source has little to do with the urge to experiment. They may coincide, but either can live just fine exclusively of one another.
Tinkering just shifted to other fields (Score:4, Interesting)
Adult "born again rocketeers" are building larger, faster, and more powerful rockets -- and the kids are following suit.
In all these cases, we've taken the manufacturing boom and used it to support our hobbies. It's not the same as tinkering with low-level parts and raw materials, but in the end you still learn a whole lot about physics, materials science, electronics, etc.
Are you kidding?! (Score:2)
DIY isn't going away.. it's getting more advanced and more exciting! (and yes, SMD soldering is very muchpractical for the home hobbyist with about $50 of the right tools)
I did hear a while ago... (Score:4, Funny)
Hogwash! (Score:4, Insightful)
What an idiot. We have just largely stopped using magazines in light of the Internet.
I've [gsu.edu] learned [tpub.com] almost [gsnu.ac.kr] everything [doctronics.co.uk] I know [ualberta.ca] about [amasci.com] electronics [ibiblio.org] from the Internet.
Look at these books! [ibiblio.org] Look at them! All Free, as in Liberty AND No-Cost. These are some of the very best books I have found on electronics, on-line or off. Forest Mims the Third, eat your heart out.
Do we want to talk about mentoring and serendipity?
There you go.
If anything, I'd say that amateur science and learning and construction is more popular now, because it is more accessible.
It just doesn't take the form of magazine articles.
Re:My take on it (Score:2)
I understand completely, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. The days when one man could do everything himself are nearing an end. There were days when you could make your own tools, chop your own wood, build your own house, hunt all your own food, make your clothes (etc ad nauseum). Now, it is much more advantageous to specialize in one particular skill, and use it to everyone's advantage.
For instance, if you're a really good computer programmer, and you specialize so much that you get paid well for it, then your time is worth more to you as a programmer, than, for instance, building a telescope or computer. If you want to study some astronomy in your spare time, it would take weeks of your "spare time" to make your own telescope first. Whereas, you could spend that time working, bring home some cash, and buy a telescope, so you can focus on what you're really interested in.
Specialization is a direct result of the complexity of our culture. Personally, I love gaming and building PCs, I don't really have the time to sit down and put together my own operating system, so I get pre-made distributions, usually here [redhat.com].
Other people, however, may be so interested in spending time coding that they would rather not put in the effort to build their own PC. So, they buy one (from Compaq [compaq.com], Dell [dell.com], or, if you have the money, Alienware [alienware.com]).
Do I hate people who buy pre-made machines? No. The fact is, I build my PCs out of pre-made parts, so I'm just as guilty, but on a different level. I have no idea how to make a sound card, and frankly, I don't really want to know. (And, there may be some guy out there that DOES know how, and thinks everyone is stupid for buying pre-made ones from Creative).
Do you see where this argument goes?
Re:Funny... (Score:2)
Re:Funny... (Score:2)
Re:Cost (Score:2)
> It's actually very expensive to set yourself up as a scientist. The
> problem is, while there's still cheap equipment around, much of the
> cutting-edge research can no longer be done on it. As our
> understanding of what makes our environment operate gets deeper,
> we've the unfortunate habit of requiring more complex equipment.
Depends on the science. There are some areas of astronomy that can be very cheap. Take meteor counting for instance. You can begin with a paper, a pencil, a timepiece and your eyes. Big spenders might opt for a clipboard, a red flashlight, a tape recorder and perhaps a mechanical counter. Those who prefer to live in the lap of luxury may opt for a comfy lounge chair.
And yes, you can perform real science doing this. After all, who is going to be caught funding the research grant for big name scientists to sit out in the cold and count meteors?
If you are really interested in doing this, check out:
http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/1101pr
"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
"Mosura", 1961
Re:Cost (Score:2)
While I'm not a scientist, I do work with them, and the cost of setting up even a basic research lab is prohibitive for an interested amateur, unless their name ends in Murdoch or Branson."---
You're very much right. In general, sciences require much more expensive equipment. However, I see some branches that do not require more. First, is computer science. Making new algorithyms and tighter code require powerful software tools, but software is a unlimited resource (dont bother explaining that to corporate coders). The overall cost is 0$, and I would have no qualms about stealing (warezing) for non-money making projects.
The second field is that of basic electronics. The big costs here will be an occiliscope and an eeprom burner. With these tools, most any project can be made. You can make your own mod-chips (12c508a pic controller), or code your own. If you wanted that OGG player for your stereo, make a player, write your own tcp/ip stack, ethernet device, and boot rom code. It's hard, yes, but the amount you learn from this is immense. All you need is something to test (o-scope), and the chip burner. You might be able to get away from having a can network and have a can-to-lan device.
Another field that would be very interesting to look around is the high energy fields (tesla's patented projects, not any of that free energy-spook shit). Energy transmission seem sreally neat, but problems occur when they flood the full bandwidth with white noise (its what it does). The FCC doesnt like this
The last is chemistry projects. Saying chemistry has been all researched is totally moronic. It's like saying the best computer science was done 20 years ago. There's big money ahead, as in ways to figure out biological reactions for ammonia. The standard process (haber, right?) uses high pressure and high heat to break down n and h to make nh. Well, niotrogen-fixing bacteria can do this without either. We just got to find the right process.
Even mathematics is a possible goal for scientists. All you need is computers. You don't even need powerful ones, as discoveries are made constantly.If you can figure out a process, you solve one of many problems.
Astronomy is getting harder because focus is farther away.
Same with physics, as the viewpoint is on that really expensive horizion
Still there's lots of DIY stuff out there that is easy to maintain and just plain do
Premature death announcements.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh please. I build stuff all the time at home and in the lab, last time I checked, places like Maxim [maximic.com] have -free- sample quantities in packages you can work with if you have a good iron (SOIC, et al). Getting boards done in small volume is cheap, use a tool like Eagle [cadsoft.de], which is even available for Linux (but not OS X, doh!). Spend a few bucks and get a quality board done at a internet based low volume PCB shop.
There are evil packages, but the truth is a lot of the prototyping and test work is done on hand placed boards. Even evil packages can be used if you get an adapter board, there are a few of them out there.
What's more telling is that now instead of messing with token things, and "wow, I actually got something to show up on the display", you can do some real work with your computer and designs and instruments. I realized awhile ago I was spending far too much of my time tinkering with things and not enough accomplishing things.. but I guess some of that is the Linux mentality too. :) Now I figure out what I want to accomplish and use the best tool, rather than attempting to make everything into a nail for my hammer [redhat.com].
For $300 or so you can even get prototype boards for FPGAs [xess.com] if you want to do custom hardware. $150 will get you a decent micro development system, and AVRGCC [avrfreaks.net] is gnu, runs on linux and windows (but not OS X :), and lets you program cheap cheap cheap AVRs to do just about anything you want. Mix with ADCs and some transistor fed relays or PWM control to do whatever. You can get software to turn your PC into a function generator to test, or if you hunt around, you can get a nice old digital oscilloscope AND a real function generator AND a bus analyser suitable for 8 bit micros (or more) for less than the cost of a PC 4 years ago.
Same thing applies for most other scientific equipment. Be careful when sourcing chemistry gear, even broken stuff, or you might have the DEA paying you a little visit if you happen to live in the USA. If high voltage fun is your bag, there's companies [amazing1.com] for that. There are even companies that sell cold fusion experiment kits - although most of the magic there seems to be in the process used to create the electrodes.
I contend there's never been a better time to BE a amateur scientist! You can actually afford to have a decent lab since last year's gear can be tracked down on the cheap.. and accomplish real work, too! How many high res night shots could you store on a $200 80gb drive? Etc, etc, etc, etc.
Death of amateur science predicted! Film at 11.