Tinkerer’s Closet – Hardware Refresh

I am a tinkerer by birth. I’ve been fiddling about with stuff since I was old enough to take a screwdriver off my dad’s workbench. I’ve done mechanical things, home repair, wood working, gardening, 3d printing, lasering, just a little bit of everything over the years. While my main profession for about 40 years has been software development, I make the rounds through my various hobbies on a fairly regular basis.

Back around 2010, it was the age of 3D printers, and iOT devices. I should say, it was the genesis of those movements, so things were a little rough. 3D printers, for example, are almost formulaic at this point. Kits are easily obtained, and finished products can be had for $300-$400 for something that would totally blow away what we had in 2010.

At that time, I was playing around with tiny devices as well. How to make a light turn on from the internet. How to turn anything on, from a simple radio controller. As such, I was into Arduino microcontrollers, which we making the rounds of popularity, and much later, the Raspberry Pi, and other “Single Board Computers”. There were also tons of sensor modules (temperature, accelerometers, light, moisture, motion, etc), and little radio transmitters and receivers. The protocols were things like Xigbee, and just raw radio waves that could be decoded to ASCII streams.

As such, I accumulated quite a lot of kit to cover all the bases. My general moto was; “Buy two of everything, because if one breaks…”

The purchasing playground for all this kit was limited to a few choice vendors. In the past it would have been Radio Shack and HeathKit, but in 2010, it was:

AdaFruit

SeeedStudio

SparkFun

There were myriad other creators coming up with various dev boards, like the low power JeeLabs, or Dangerous Prototypes and their BusPirate product (still going today). But, mostly their stuff would end up at one of these reliable vendors, along with their own creations.

Lately, and why I’m writing this missive, I’ve been looking at the landscape of my workshop, wanting to regain some space, and make space for new projects. As such, I started looking through those hidey holes, where electronics components tend to hide, and hang out for generations. I’ve started going through the plastic bins, looking for things that are truly out of date, no longer needed, never going to find their way into a project, no longer supported by anyone, and generally, just taking up space.

To Wit, I’ve got a growing list of things that are headed for the scrap heaps;

433Mhz RF link kit, 915Mhz RF Link Kit, Various versions of Arduinos, Various versions of Raspberry Pi, TV B Gone KIt (built one, tossing the other, maybe save for soldering practice for the kids), Various Xigbee modules, Parallax Propellar (real neat stuff), SIM Card Reader, Gadget Factory FPGA boards and wings, trinkets, wearables, and myriad other things either as kits, boards, and what have you.

I’m sad to see it go, knowing how lovingly I put it all together over the years. But, most of that stuff from from 13 years ago. Things have advanced since then.

It used to be the “Arduino” was the dominant microcontroller and form factor for very small projects. Those boards could run $30, and weren’t much compared to what we have today. Nowadays, the new kids in town are the ESP 32 line of compute modules, along with form factors such as the Adafruit supported “Feather”. A lot of the modules you used to buy separate, like Wifi, are just a part of the chip package, along with BlueTooth. Even the battery charging circuitry, which used to be a whole separate board, is just a part of the module now. I can buy a feather board for $15, and it will have LiPo charging circuitry, USB-C connectivity for power and programming, Wifi (abgn), and BlueTooth LE. The same board will have 8 or 16Mb or RAM, and possibly even dual cores! That’s about $100 worth of components from 2010, all shrunken down to a board about the size of my big thumb. Yes, it’s definitely time to hit refresh.

So, I’m getting rid of all this old stuff, with a tear in my eye, but a smile on my face, because there’s new stuff to be purchased!! The hobby will continue.

I’m happily building new machines, so my purchases are more targeted than the general education I was pursuing back then. New CPUs, new instructions sets, new data sheets, new capabilities, dreams, and possibilities. It’s both a sad and joyous day, because some of the new stuff at the low end even has the words “AI Enabled” on it, so let’s see.

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