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I would largely disagree that there are no longer things that the curious individual can tinker with. Granted, a lot of consumer electronics are too complex for

I would largely disagree that there are no longer things that the curious individual can tinker with. Granted, a lot of consumer electronics are too complex for the average person to fix or figure out, but that doesn't mean there aren't things out there for the curious. Arduino, and products like it, as others have mentioned, offers a great way for someone to get into embedded systems. You can get a decent setup for around $100US that offers way more potential than opening up an old phone or TV. I've grown up in the era of the black box, and I was still able to find things to pull apart and figure out when I was a kid. Even better, technology had gotten to the point where things like LEGO Mindstorm allowed me to tinker with something without upsetting my parents by breaking something they used. Later, when I got into music and started playing guitar, I made some money by figuring out how to repair tube amplifiers, a decidedly old technology, but one that continues to thrive in the guitar world. I purchased several tube amps on eBay for ~$20 each. I reverse engineered them and turned them into guitar amps. I built a tube amp from the ground up, even putting together the turret board and drilling the chasis. I do agree that there is value in keeping things open, but the argument that there isn't anything out there for the next generation to open up sounds a lot like another "Well, back in my day" story.

dbz 17y ago
You are correct. There are still a plethora of ``things``, which can be reverse engineered. However, most of them, (in my opinion?), are not things which I, or any other normal person, uses daily (cell phone,digital camera, computer, a car key which only needs to be near the car to allow someone to start the car and unlocks the car when the person, or a person touching the person, touches the car, and ect.). I'm not trying to say that people don't use guitar amps daily- I'm trying to say that pretty much anything containing that green circuit board with little black chips and bumpy things all over it- will be next to impossible for a 13 year old kid to figure out. I mean. Of course there is google and the wikipedia, but I mean figure out on his or her own time like you did.
- ahlatimer 17y ago
  I do agree that the number of everyday things that can be reverse engineered has dropped, but likely if one was so inclined to reverse engineer something, he or she would find something to reverse engineer. I would go so far as to say that the number of things that can get a 13 year old into tinkering has grown, not shrunk. The internet has opened up communities that would otherwise be unreachable to our hypothetical teen. For my own case, had it not been for the internet, I would've never gotten into tube circuits. I never would have been able to make heads or tails of even the most basic tube amp design, even given the schematics. On top of that, I probably would've either killed myself or caused serious harm to myself if I did try to poke around those circuits without having researched it. Tube circuits can have deadly amounts of electricity in them even when they're unplugged and turned off. The same is true for old (and new?) TVs, I believe. I'm 20. PCBs were pretty much ubiquitous by the time I was old enough to really start digging into things. That never stopped me, and I don't believe it would stop someone that's 13 now and has the inclination to take things apart and figure out how they work.
  - bmalicoat 17y ago
    I think part of the problem is people don't know they are inclined to tinkering. If you grew up around VCRs and they broke and you wanted to try to save some money, you open it and see if you can do anything. This seems to be a common way to first start off. Nowadays you open it and immediately close it because there is no reasonable way to approach an IC or PCB without prior knowledge. Of course there are the more industrious (and more annoying to their parents) who go on opening things that weren't broken and mess around in them. Those people are the ones who will actively go out and by arduinos. But it seems the first group is a dying breed.

dbz 17y ago

You are correct. There are still a plethora of ``things``, which can be reverse engineered. However, most of them, (in my opinion?), are not things which I, or any other normal person, uses daily (cell phone,digital camera, computer, a car key which only needs to be near the car to allow someone to start the car and unlocks the car when the person, or a person touching the person, touches the car, and ect.). I'm not trying to say that people don't use guitar amps daily- I'm trying to say that pretty much anything containing that green circuit board with little black chips and bumpy things all over it- will be next to impossible for a 13 year old kid to figure out. I mean. Of course there is google and the wikipedia, but I mean figure out on his or her own time like you did.

ahlatimer 17y ago
I do agree that the number of everyday things that can be reverse engineered has dropped, but likely if one was so inclined to reverse engineer something, he or she would find something to reverse engineer. I would go so far as to say that the number of things that can get a 13 year old into tinkering has grown, not shrunk. The internet has opened up communities that would otherwise be unreachable to our hypothetical teen. For my own case, had it not been for the internet, I would've never gotten into tube circuits. I never would have been able to make heads or tails of even the most basic tube amp design, even given the schematics. On top of that, I probably would've either killed myself or caused serious harm to myself if I did try to poke around those circuits without having researched it. Tube circuits can have deadly amounts of electricity in them even when they're unplugged and turned off. The same is true for old (and new?) TVs, I believe. I'm 20. PCBs were pretty much ubiquitous by the time I was old enough to really start digging into things. That never stopped me, and I don't believe it would stop someone that's 13 now and has the inclination to take things apart and figure out how they work.
- bmalicoat 17y ago
  I think part of the problem is people don't know they are inclined to tinkering. If you grew up around VCRs and they broke and you wanted to try to save some money, you open it and see if you can do anything. This seems to be a common way to first start off. Nowadays you open it and immediately close it because there is no reasonable way to approach an IC or PCB without prior knowledge. Of course there are the more industrious (and more annoying to their parents) who go on opening things that weren't broken and mess around in them. Those people are the ones who will actively go out and by arduinos. But it seems the first group is a dying breed.