12 Jun
2006
12 Jun
'06
9:42 p.m.
=20
Whether it is the chicken or the egg, they also have access to better =
parts
stores (for hobbiest quantities) and excellent magazines. The Dutch
magazine Electuur is translated into English and published in the UK =
every
month as Elector. It has excellent construction articles, readily =
available
firmware, and even the PCB layout for most of the projects.
Elektor is the best of a dwindling number of electronics magazines
available in the UK. It's improved in the last 5 years or so as they now
do make firmware sources available for about 50% of their projects (but
not the interesting ones, alas). Before that (and for the other 50% now)
you have to buy the programmed device from them, and it comes copy-protected.
Since I generally build in order to learn, this is a major reason for me
not to build said project.
Anotehr disadvantage is that their computer-related projects invariably
have Windows software. The sources of that may not be available, the link
between the PC and the project (RS232, USB, parallel ports) may not be
properly documented.
=20
We have nothing like it in the States.
=20
For whatever reason, the UK and to a lesser extent, the EU have kept the
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