OT-ish: Build-it stuff

Tony Duell wrote: It must be really dire in the States, becasue your comments don't seem to apply to the UK that I live in. 10 years ago, we had a number of Maplin shops around the country. All they really sold were components and kits. Many a time when I was doing my Ph.D in Bristol, I'd take the bus up the Gloucester road to get some components I needed for my work. Maplin still exist, but they now sell mostly crap consumer electronics. There is a small selection of components in the catalogue, but very few of them are kept in the shops. You have to special-order them. Yes we have RS and Farnell, but they're effectively mail order only. It's not a problem to have to mail-order the main components for a project (microcontrollers, memroy, power transformers, etc). It's a right pain when you're half way through a design and find you've run out of 10k resistors :-) I live in London. In the entire London area (which I define as the bus pass zone, and is a lot larger than most people think of as London), I know of _one_ shop where I can pop in to get resistors, etc. To be fair they have a good selection of common semiconductors too, but such places are not at all common. The SU EMC directives, mis-applied by our glorious government, have effectively killed off the small kit market in the UK too. And magazines. 20 years ago there were many titles. Now I can think of 2 (Elektor and Everyday/Practical Electronics). One thing that's not helped are that ICs now come in hacker-unfriendly pacakges, and may require expensice programming software and hardware to do anything with. I can see why, I don't expect semiconductor manufacturers to cater for a very small market, but you know, it's a lot easier for the average home constructor to hand-wire 100 TTL chips in DIL pacakges than to do battle with a DGA packaed FPGA... -tony ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Billy: Yes, things really suck in the US. I hit the shops around Silicon Valley and Orange County. It is a sad mix, except for one or two shops left - Weird Stuff and Halted. Nothing like ten years ago. I was in Boston in April and out on 128 and found nothing. That used to be a great place for computers and electronics. I'm probably showing my age, but when I lived in London, there were lots of nice little shops along the Edgeware Road. Another bunch were close to Paddington. I looked for them a couple of years ago and only found one open. Then were some more up near Buck and Ryan's, my number one stop whenever I go into London. What is the one place left in London? I go in to London from Colechester a few times a year. Would love to find a source of small lots. Maplin used to have a nice store in Southend, but honestly, I haven't been in it for ten years. Magazines are pretty much as you describe. I used to be able to pick up 8 or 10 different ones a month, with Wireless World being supreme. Now it's two or three like you said. But that is still more than we have here. Nuts and Volts is it and it is pretty basic. Billy