[sdiy] Death of DIY?

[Rainer Buchty]

> > a) lack of the great "gee whiz!" factor in people under 30yrs old. I
> > think many of the DIYers were in grade school in 1970 at the height of
> > Moog Mania. A nice stereo was 8 months of saving (only doctors and
> > RICH PEOPLE had credit cards). Ham radio was still a large DIY
> > community.
>
> hey!!!!
> I went to school in the 80's dude!

Same here. But it was indeed some report on TV about one of those big and
blinking altairs connected with a myriad of wires which brought me into
synthesizers. Always wanted to build a Formant but never got the right
parts (basically, the huge 19" casing and the keyboard) to start.

Speaking of ham radio... Time has moved on here as well. It's just no fun
anymore if I spend hours over hours on the "all famous" DJ6HP RTTY
converter - and somebody else just plugs in his PTC-II controller which is
mainly software and literally hears the grass growing.

Who's converting commercial teletypers into RTTY equipment? Who's building
his very own packet radio equipment? Nobody. Get a PTC-II or at least a
standard TNC for the less fancy stuff.

> I grew up with the DX7 and D50, hated both for their complete lack of
> soul.

Ah, no, those machines were great. They were somewhat a breakthrough in
sound - but OTOH soon enough you got fed up with them cause everywhere you
could hear the DX E-Piano, the DX bass and the D50 "we call it animated
noise". Something like that.

Similarly, later on the M1 piano and the typical Wavestation wavesequences
were used to death.

> > b) affluent parents.

No, but a father being radio amateur helps a lot. So the first thing I
took with me into kindergarden was a transistor ("Rainer, be honest, you
made that word up!"), needless to say that I was fluent in ASCII and
Baudot at the age of 8 and could read straight punched tape :)

> true, but the other thing;- 'Why should I make it for $100 when I can
> buy it for $120?' people are inherently lazy, if they can find an easy
> way to do what they want, they will... kinda like water (shortest
> path,etc)

Sure, but if I need something now, why should I build it for $100 if I can
get it readily assembled and tested for $120?

> Also electronics are getting smaller and faster....
> How many people here can successully solder a 208pin QFP?
> now how many can solder a 40pin DIL?

Go for BGA :)

A colleague of mine built his very own BGA soldering station consisting of
an ironing plate, a small aluminum pipe equipped with 3 halogen lamps and
a bunch of fans. Temperature control is done through some rs232-equipped
multimeter and a PC which controls the fans, the lamps and the ironing
plate through LPT port bits.

Works amazingly good and was successfully used on prototypes already.

> also people dont seem as willing to 'differ from the norm' so why should
> they want modulars, new and different synths? when they can buy 'that
> crazy dance sound' from a Yamalond SR9697 groove box for $299.....

I think that's the problem of too many people having entered the
electronic music market. Once a thing is "hip" and everybody wants to do
it, that thing gets flooded with crap. People will buy it anyway, just
tell'em that it's way cool and you can get the next #1 hit by just
pressing a few buttons (judging from today's #1 hits I would second
that...)

> Apathy for the learning curve.

That's it. The grapes are way to immature nowadays to put it with Aesop.

And this is not only with DIY - but everywhere. And it's probably
wanted... DIYers know how things work (at least, they are trying to
understand) and will (try to) repair stuff if it breaks. Bad customer
behaviour. Throw it away, buy it new.

Here in Germany there has been a steady decline of "general purpose" DIY
magazines. And try finding a hardware hack in a current computer magazine
(not to think of the Keyboards magazine which 15-18 years ago published
nifty stuff like how to convert your Sinclair Spectrum into a drum box,
tweak the PC's UART to work with 31250Bit/s etc.) ... Those were the
times.

Rainer

-- 

Rainer Buchty, LRR, Technical University of Munich
Phone: +49 89 289-28401, Fax +49 89 289-28232, Room S3240