Quote Originally Posted by T.Jackson View Post
People who are prepared to continuously educate themselves though possibly a lot of trial & error because of an absence of published literature, projects, kits, and they'll be working with surface mount components.
Sorry, but I dont get that comment!!!

In most subjects you are "continuously educated" because no-one can ever know everything. New tools, components, methods are always emerging in most fields.

Trial and error is how you learn. If you assemble a kit and it works then you know how to assemble a kit. If you assemble a kit or build something from scratch and it DOESNT WORK then you have to fix it. That means you have to learn what all the components do and how it should function. Once you have fixed it you then understand far more about the circuit and use that information in the future.

As for the absence of "published literature", 20 years ago, if a new IC came out that looked interesting you had to pay for a poorly photocopied datasheet from your component supplier, now you just download it.

If YOU didnt know the answer to a problem then you probably had little chance of ever getting it working unless you knew someone else who was trying to achieve the same thing, now with the internet you just Google and either find the answer straight off, or as in the case of this forum, get like minded people applying their varied experience to thrash out a solution.

The internet has create millions of "hobby clubs" covering every subject under the sun and put people in touch with each other that would never ever have met.

In my opinion the biggest threat to a hobby such as ours is legislation that limits the activities that we can do. ROHS, CE, UL etc etc.

Whilst there are less magazines available and less places to buy components locally, the availability of components has never been wider. Online catalogues mean that you can buy bits from anywhere in the world whereas previously you would have been totally unaware of their existance.

On the downside, if your computer dies then you are totally stuffed. Cant read the datasheets, cant order bits,cant program chips, and cant summon help. LOL