Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a hobby in the early 80s?

Re:Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a ho... by hayst4ck on Sunday May 28, 2023 @07:55PM (#36108996)

We made abstractions successfully, world changing abstractions.

Do the NAND to Tetris course and see that tech is abstractions on top of abstractions. Electronics today is frequently represented by code. Check out Verilog or VHDL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language

Where electronics stayed interesting is in the realm where code meets reality -> robotics and art.

Playing with LED's, robotics competitions, quad copters, cosplay. Maybe adjacent to SDR. Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos.

Check out ADAFruit: https://www.adafruit.com/

or Sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/

Check out sites like: https://hackaday.com/

There is also the greater cultures: Maker culture and hacker culture. Maker Faire is super interesting and has many many attendees.

I would say that in America, it is harder to work with electronics because the number of maker spaces and places you could buy parts (RadioShack/Fry's) greatly diminished, but afluent folks can definitely have an electronics hobby supplied by online vendors.

(Disclaimer: This isn't my hobby, this is just my understanding)

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Re:Ask HN: Did students lose interest in electronics as a ho... by sacnoradhq on Sunday May 28, 2023 @10:42PM (#36109990)

In university, we used individual macro components in Altera's tools (ModelSim/Quartus) to construct a microcoded, superscalar, pipelined CPU with branch prediction. It was way more painful than Verilog but had a "visual programming" UX to it.

For a complete processor emulating the real world, there's OpenSPARC.

https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...

I'm sure there are dozens of open core RISC-V implementations out there and maybe some ARM ones too.

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