10 ms·

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. L

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?)), a host of retail outlets, and several equipment manufacturers selling into the market. In the "modern" era, there are no profitable magazines or web sites or blogs or ANYTHING with respect to this hobby, there are NO brick and mortar retail components stores, and no equipment maker sells into this market. So why is this? I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the "cost" of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn't changed. Nor has postage or warehouse space etc. But the interesting follow on effect is that it makes no sense to pay $8000 for an advertisement (the full page price of an ad in Modern Electronics in 1980) when you might generate an additional $4K in revenue. Similarly for blogs or podcasts where 70 to 90% of the ad revenue goes to the ad network (Google, Bing, Etc.) Open source is great, but without money people have to work other jobs and so their ability to contribute quality time to their hobbies, much less full time to them, is that much harder to do. I used to write free lance articles for Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and others and they would pay me $600 - $800 per article. A recent article suggests that the editors for Hackaday get paid but the places they link? They just get "exposure." (cue the Oatmeal comic on spending "exposure"). There are some standouts, like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small. They are certainly not a "Radio Shack" level of enterprise. I don't know what the "fix" is, but there is some re-imagining, re-inventing that needs to go on here to pay these people who put in their time to make the "maker movement" work. Or it will continue to struggle.

worldmerge 5y ago
I miss going to my local Radio Shack and getting components. When they went under I could really only get components online. Sure, there is a commercial supplier near me but they are only open 9-5ish M-F and don't have a website. It would be great if they were able to digitize their inventory and ship orders. I wonder why some commercial focused companies make it so hard for non-commercial customers to access their business (I'm including companies that have websites but make it clear they only sell to contractors)?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > I wonder why some commercial focused companies make it so hard for non-commercial customers to access their business (I'm including companies that have websites but make it clear they only sell to contractors)? Too much effort for too little revenue. The probability of a customer spending only $50, but also needing 2 hours of customer service might be too high. Once you engage in a transaction with someone, there’s a lot of possible future liability that comes with it.
  - SQueeeeeL 5y ago
    Entry level consumers tend to be complicated. People order the wrong part and want a return, or drop an order after they're provided an invoice. It's just easier if you're a very small shop to cater towards the straightforward customers
- ajdude 5y ago
  I had this very same issue yesterday. I needed one particular component now, not “x days from now, Online.” I knew it was something that radio shack would have had, but I had to drive an hour and a half to the closest microcenter.
  - kaetemi 5y ago
    A foodpanda-like service for instant shopping at nearby stores online would be cool.
ipsum2 5y ago
> like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small I'm surprised, Adafruit has a 50-100% markup on most items compared to Aliexpress/other Chinese electronics.
- ta988 5y ago
  Yes, but you get it fast, with service and no random customs problems. Sometimes for things that don't scale ($20 vs $10 one time) it may not matter much for some.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    I assume Adafruit is fast for people on the east coast or if you pay a lot for shipping. I looked into Adafruit's west coast distributors but they only have a few of their products. (Jameco carries some Adafruit stuff but typically not what I'm looking for.)
    - tonyarkles 5y ago
      Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.
      - skybrian 5y ago
        Yeah, that's nice. Digikey is in Minnesota so I assume that helps for some parts of Canada. It looks like it's only free for orders above $100? Amazon is worth a look too, particularly for Prime users.
        tonyarkles 5y ago
        Yeah, one of the options they have is "Incoterms DDP" (delivered duty paid). From what I can tell, they'll sometimes stick the packages in a truck and ship them out from Winnipeg instead of shipping directly from their facility in Thief River Falls. Saves all of the painful customs things that FedEx and UPS seem to screw up on a regular basis. Edit: also, I generally have a hard time keeping my order under $100, so I guess I've never actually seen what the shipping fee would be :D
ahmedalsudani 5y ago
It’s a different world of smartphones and apps. Not to say that your lamentation for what’s lost is invalid, but you’ll find some incredible people on those new platforms. Check out Jeremy Fielding, Machine Thinking, AvE, and many others on YouTube. We have lost, and we have gained.
- 20after4 5y ago
  Two more top-notch youtubers: Leo's Bag of Tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq968AFgPhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq968AFgPhg Tech Ingredients: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVSHXNNBitaPd5lYz48--yg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVSHXNNBitaPd5lYz48--yg
ptorrone 5y ago
i will be interviewing them, so if there are any questions you want me to ask, feel free to post them here. (i work at adafruit, founded hackaday)
- brysonreece 5y ago
  Hey Phil! I'd be interested to know if Hackaday has any plans for branded events when deemed safe? With Hackaday.io it also seems like the potential is there to help organize community events or maker-faires on a larger scale as we reenter a post-pandemic world — a gap not really filled since the fall of Make. (A "Hackaweek" hackercamp sounds like it would be a blast)
- cushychicken 5y ago
  Thanks for starting hackaday, Phil. Has made for great reading for me for many years, from a no-nothing kid in the aughts to a professional EE now.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  Are they going to support their maker/hacker ecosystem with versions of their EDA tools? To support things like Efabless [1] and the Skywater PDK with commercial grade tooling would be awesome. What is their long term vision for how this acquisition fits into the rest of their electronics and engineering portfolio? https://www.efabless.com/open_shuttle_program https://www.efabless.com/open_shuttle_program
- dlsa 5y ago
  I'm actually more interested in how you started hackaday and the story behind it. Early years up to now. Cheers!
michaelt 5y ago
I suspect hobby electronics has faced stiff competition from hobby computing, among people inclined towards tinkering. The people who, in the 1980s might have been using a 555 timer to blink an LED? These days they've got a computer, and they're making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript. Oh sure, a few of them might get an Arduino and blink an LED from time to time - but nowhere near enough to support high street component stores. Of course, from a certain perspective hobby electronics has never been better. Component stockists with huge ranges and fast, cheap shipping? Professionally produced PCBs for $5 including shipping? Microcontrollers with built-in wifi for $1? And the compilers and dev tools are all free? Some of these things have never been better :)
- caf 5y ago
  The PCB thing is huge. Back in the 90s I was carefully tracing out circuits with a resist pen, etching them with a ferric chloride bath and hand-drilling the component holes. Not only was this extremely finicky and time-consuming, it was expensive! I only ever made a handful of boards of my own design.
- mjevans 5y ago
  I haven't tried making a PCB for over a decade. $5 PCBs sound great, but what might appeal to me even more is an associated robotic CNC and surface mount service to install all the fiddly stuff and source the 10-50 whatevers of each thing I need from an assembly house's yearly consumption of 5 million Xs. Are there any services like that? Where small runs are possible without the massive cost effect if picking parts that are already in flow?
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > Are there any services like that? Yes, lots of them. JLPCB even has a promo right now where they do SMT assembly for free. https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/146-2-for-1-4-layer-pcbs https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/146-2-for-1-4-layer-pcbs
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  > they're making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript. Would rather have more hardware people than software but sadly not the case. Hardware is...well...hard. Automating deployments? eh not so much. This seems to be a general trend where the smart people are gravitating towards "not hard" fields like data science, software and finance. So our houses look like they're straight out of the future retro 60s except for our flat LCD smart TVs and and Alexa pods.
ashtonkem 5y ago
> I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the "cost" of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn't changed. I believe this is a case of "cost disease", when the labor in one sector continues to get more expensive without matching productivity gains.
genmud 5y ago
I am actually not sure I 100% agree with that take on it. I would argue that much of the sales of 1975-1985 places like Radio Shack/Tandy/etc. were around early adopters of home computing. And I would also assume that the vast majority of the sales/items they had were finished projects, not "maker market" type of stuff. Many of the magazines of that era are "how to build $x for your home" or "program $y". I would say that what we are seeing is the market getting much more mature and specialized rather than the makers market going away. I don't think it was ever big enough to be sustainable to begin with, it just so happened that products required bits here and there that those companies had any volume from the general public on maker type of stuff.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  Back in the day (i.e., the period you're talking about!) Radio Shack -- back when their name was two words, rather than "RadioShack" -- sold bare components, breadboards, and IIRC even blank circuit boards, as well as all sorts of textbooks about electronics and various projects. They certainly weren't focused on the "makers' market" but they very explicitly catered to it. And, really, I don't know if there's anything like that today. I'm not sure that a store like the original Radio Shack could exist anymore; I mean, RadioShack may have given up on the space for a reason, indeed the reason that you cite (it wasn't big enough to be sustainable). But that doesn't mean that its departure isn't a genuine void, however small.
  - jennasys 5y ago
    For a lucky few, there are a some Micro Center brick & mortar stores around that have a surprisingly up-to-date and diverse selection of electronic components and tools stocked. They are doing what Frys should have done when the market shifted.
kiba 5y ago
Is 33 million dollars of revenue per year considered small?
- maxerickson 5y ago
  A single fast food place might have several million dollars of revenue.
PavleMiha 5y ago
Purely anecdotally it looks to me that a lot of it moved to (pretty profitable) youtube channels, all the way from Mark Roper, to Applied Science, Simone Giertz, Michael Reeves, etc.
- kragen 5y ago
  Ben Krasnow and Simone Giertz are pretty great, but they're hackers: the kind of people who used to shop at Radio Shack and read Modern Electronics. There's a world of difference between watching Simone Giertz build hilarious contraptions and building those contraptions yourself. Chuck is saying that 40 years ago there were so many hackers doing these things that there was a whole workforce—partly, but not entirely, a hacker workforce—selling them what they needed for their arcane hobbies. And that, today, there isn't. You seem to suggest that average teenage wankers watching Simone Giertz's escapades is roughly equivalent to 01980s hackers buying transistors at Radio Shack to build a walkie-talkie out of. They aren't. Watching a video of someone doing something is completely different from doing it yourself.
  - rasz 5y ago
    Whole workforce supplying hackers is still here and thriving, its just based in Shenzhen.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Shenzhen (and Taipei, Wuxi, etc.) supplies the electronics for the entire world economy, which it turns out is mostly boring incompetent greyface stuff like General Motors and Cemex. They supply hackers too, but hackers are a minority of their customer base. Shenzhen's customer base isn't comparable to that of Radio Shack or Byte.
      - rasz 5y ago
        I dont understand your argument. People named Ralph are the minority of Walmart customers, therefore .. ?? The difference between eighties and now is in the eighties corporations wouldnt even talk to you, so you had to go to RadioShacks, hamventions, or live near Akihabara Electric Town. Nowadays random hacker has access to whole planets supply chain with overnight shipping and websites taking orders 24/7.
spoonjim 5y ago
I disagree with your take on the "makers" market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985. Yes, there are no "brick and mortar" stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don't need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it's not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part today which sometimes sucks but that's life. We don't need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for free. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that's because there's more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means. Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can't be bought, and if there's enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy's homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.
- kragen 5y ago
  I think this is right. In 01980 you needed a lot of people working on a magazine and buying ads in it to get Don Lancaster's columns out to the teeming unwashed masses. Now Don just posts them on https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 and he can publish lots more than he ever could back in the newsprint days. (The only loss is that he could use a proofreader.) I don't know how much Don spends on hosting† to make everything he's ever written instantly available to every hacker in the whole world but I'm guessing it's about US$100 a month. Inflation-adjusted, that's probably less than Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office coffeepot. Not counting the price of the coffee. He's written about the days Chuck is—wrongly, I think—eulogizing in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf. The objective we should measure ourselves against is not the headcount in retail sales (though Amazon seems to have a workforce of substantial size) or the number of inkstains on people's hands; it's access to knowledge and tools, and the power to create that access unlocks. It's people dreaming of wonderful things that never were, and making them real. It's human flourishing. So, how are we doing on that? ______ † Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on Microsoft's continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill, Don hosts his own pages.
antattack 5y ago
Hobbyist money is still flowing, but most of it goes directly to China.
adolph 5y ago
I don’t think this is universally right about brick and mortar. I don’t remember MicroCenter having a RadioShack-like section before but it is there now with a bunch of Adafruit, Raspberry, Pimori, BBC Microbit, etc. In a large metro like Houston, there are also local stores like EPO and regional chains like Altex. I can see how smaller metro areas can’t support the same actual stores as before, but online serves the long tails of specialized demand and supply better anyway. https://epohouston.com/ https://epohouston.com/ https://www.altex.com/Tech-Supplies/Electronic-Parts/Mechanical-Switches https://www.altex.com/Tech-Supplies/Electronic-Parts/Mechani...
rm445 5y ago
Just to shout out that Raspberry Pi Press produce some excellent print magazines, albeit very beginner-focused. Whether they'd be a profitable standalone business I don't know, but as a whole the Raspberry Pi operation seems to be very successful.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Also: what's Circuit Cellar, chopped liver? Circuit Cellar is an excellent print magazine, easily on par with the best of those available in the 1980s and earlier.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
"There are NO brick and mortar retail components stores" - unless you live in Shenzhen (Huaqiangbei), Tokyo (Akihabara), Taipei (Guanghua), or Kaohsiung (Changmingjie). Electronics is one of the things I miss most about living there. The air pollution was terrible though. New Zealand has great air, a good second-hand market (2014 Retina MacBook Pro for 300 USD), but 1-2 months shipping does slow down my hobby electronics. Jaycar, PBTech, JB HiFi have a few common items, but nothing like I could get in China, Japan, or Taiwan. It makes me think twice before buying gadgets though, which might be a good thing!
- rasz 5y ago
  There used to be a great Electronics Open Air Marked in Poland. Over 100 tents and permanent shops open every weekend. http://www.wolumen.com.pl/index.php?page=infogielda http://www.wolumen.com.pl/index.php?page=infogielda Nowadays there are probably 20 electronics shops remaining, the rest is occupied by grocery/meat/fresh produce suppliers. You can see how it evolved in Street View switching camera between 2009-2017 footage. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wolumen+53,+01-912+Warszawa/@52.2861188,20.9374574,3a,75y,125.46h,99.25t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sFyxh65BYG97tjZCrCmS9uQ!2e0!5s20170801T000000!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x471eca2de7931387:0xbe0e2e10022a4164!8m2!3d52.2856059!4d20.9393039 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wolumen+53,+01-912+Warszaw...
roland35 5y ago
Do you think some sort of automated storefronts could replace the old hardware stores like RadioShack? I would love to have a place I could drive to and pick up some components that I need TODAY, and I always thought a giant vending machine might be good for that!
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  There isn't a single electronics store in the SF Bay Area where you can drive up, walk down a row of capacitors, and find one that isn't (1) holdover stock from the 1980s or (2) a no-name capacitor brand that will fail to deliver on it's specifications. And even the stores with 1980s holdover stock or bottom-barrel crapware are going away. People would rather just wait 2-4 days for Amazon or even wait 10 days for Mouser/DK. It's that bad. I think there's a sweet spot where a brick and mortar store can sell components. In fact I think the potential there is huge. It'll have to do a lot of things exactly right: 1) Knowledgeable, non-snooty staff who can answer a question quickly and effectively. "My daughter is making an LED circuit" "Okay, LED kit is here, buy some roughly 330 ohm resistors here, these LEDs can't handle 3v directly so they need something to take up the overage, thank you, next customer" 2) Sell parts people want. If your warehouse is full of parts made in 1982 that should fill you with existential dread. Scour Amazon and ebay for electronics parts to determine what is popular. Follow maker sites to determine what parts people are using in hobby projects. 3) Resist the urge to sell high-margin items like phones, Remote-control cars, casio keyboards, or to start your own line of personal computers. That's what did Radio Shack in. You can get such things cheaper online, and no one needs a casio keyboard TODAY the way they need a handfull of 470mocrofarad capacitors TODAY.
  - iancmceachern 5y ago
    What about Jameco?
phendrenad2 5y ago
The "makers market" works just fine if you're selling Arduinos from China. The rest, all of it, adafruit, sparkfun, hackaday, supplyframe, tindie, all seem to have been acquired based on user count. I don't think Supplyframe or Siemens has any idea how to monetize them, but maybe there are juicy sales leads to discover in the userbase. Probably not, but you never know.
- ptorrone 5y ago
  adafruit was not sold to siemens
LegitShady 5y ago
meanwhile I just bought a handful of 600mhz Teensy 4.1s a little while back for ~$25 USD that I never saw an ad for. I have a drawer full of raspberry pis and arduinos. I can program them on my normal computer with very little risk. There are lots of parts available from adafruit/digikey/newark/etc etc. It already comes with a lot of libraries etc done and there are many more on github. So I guess it depends on the tradeoff. Magazines and magazine ads didn't survive the internet intact anywhere in any industry. They're all dying. That isn't special for electronics - its because its easier and cheaper on the internet, and more people will see it. And they don't need to be a radio shack enterprise, because they aren't doing what radio shack did. Radio shack went out of business.
zargon 5y ago
Nobody subscribes to magazines today. The entire consumer electronics market today can barely support one and a half brick and mortar chains (Best Buy and Micro Center). Yet I can get commercially produced PCBs of my own design for less than the cost of the box it will go in. Information is more accessible than ever. Anyone can set up a web store and sell their creations. Markets are different than they were in the '80s.
IgorPartola 5y ago
There are loads of YouTube channels dedicated to 3D printing alone. These are full time jobs for a number of people, and I bet there are more of them than there were employees at the six magazines. There may not be a Radio Shack that sells you gear but there certainly factories and online stores dedicated to maker spaces. Triangle Labs, Big Tree Tech, Prusa, Monoprice, JLCPCB, just to name a small handful of the ones I’ve interacted with recently. And the amount of stuff you can do today is staggering vs even a few years ago. You might be seeing the situation through nostalgia goggles.
TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
I really miss Byte [0]. It covered a wide range of computing, from Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar [1], to my introduction to hypertext. It was great to read the in-depth reviews of both products [2] and technologies, and get an understanding of what was going on in the tech world. [0] - https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?tab=collection [1] - https://circuitcellar.com/ https://circuitcellar.com/ [2] - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/013-end-of-the-beginning https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/013-end-of...

worldmerge 5y ago

I miss going to my local Radio Shack and getting components. When they went under I could really only get components online. Sure, there is a commercial supplier near me but they are only open 9-5ish M-F and don't have a website. It would be great if they were able to digitize their inventory and ship orders. I wonder why some commercial focused companies make it so hard for non-commercial customers to access their business (I'm including companies that have websites but make it clear they only sell to contractors)?

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> I wonder why some commercial focused companies make it so hard for non-commercial customers to access their business (I'm including companies that have websites but make it clear they only sell to contractors)? Too much effort for too little revenue. The probability of a customer spending only $50, but also needing 2 hours of customer service might be too high. Once you engage in a transaction with someone, there’s a lot of possible future liability that comes with it.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  Entry level consumers tend to be complicated. People order the wrong part and want a return, or drop an order after they're provided an invoice. It's just easier if you're a very small shop to cater towards the straightforward customers
ajdude 5y ago
I had this very same issue yesterday. I needed one particular component now, not “x days from now, Online.” I knew it was something that radio shack would have had, but I had to drive an hour and a half to the closest microcenter.
- kaetemi 5y ago
  A foodpanda-like service for instant shopping at nearby stores online would be cool.

ipsum2 5y ago

> like Adafruit, but even there the margins are tight and the operations are small I'm surprised, Adafruit has a 50-100% markup on most items compared to Aliexpress/other Chinese electronics.

ta988 5y ago
Yes, but you get it fast, with service and no random customs problems. Sometimes for things that don't scale ($20 vs $10 one time) it may not matter much for some.
- skybrian 5y ago
  I assume Adafruit is fast for people on the east coast or if you pay a lot for shipping. I looked into Adafruit's west coast distributors but they only have a few of their products. (Jameco carries some Adafruit stuff but typically not what I'm looking for.)
  - tonyarkles 5y ago
    Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      Yeah, that's nice. Digikey is in Minnesota so I assume that helps for some parts of Canada. It looks like it's only free for orders above $100? Amazon is worth a look too, particularly for Prime users.
      - tonyarkles 5y ago
        Yeah, one of the options they have is "Incoterms DDP" (delivered duty paid). From what I can tell, they'll sometimes stick the packages in a truck and ship them out from Winnipeg instead of shipping directly from their facility in Thief River Falls. Saves all of the painful customs things that FedEx and UPS seem to screw up on a regular basis. Edit: also, I generally have a hard time keeping my order under $100, so I guess I've never actually seen what the shipping fee would be :D

ahmedalsudani 5y ago

It’s a different world of smartphones and apps. Not to say that your lamentation for what’s lost is invalid, but you’ll find some incredible people on those new platforms. Check out Jeremy Fielding, Machine Thinking, AvE, and many others on YouTube. We have lost, and we have gained.

20after4 5y ago
Two more top-notch youtubers: Leo's Bag of Tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq968AFgPhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq968AFgPhg Tech Ingredients: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVSHXNNBitaPd5lYz48--yg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVSHXNNBitaPd5lYz48--yg

ptorrone 5y ago

i will be interviewing them, so if there are any questions you want me to ask, feel free to post them here. (i work at adafruit, founded hackaday)

brysonreece 5y ago
Hey Phil! I'd be interested to know if Hackaday has any plans for branded events when deemed safe? With Hackaday.io it also seems like the potential is there to help organize community events or maker-faires on a larger scale as we reenter a post-pandemic world — a gap not really filled since the fall of Make. (A "Hackaweek" hackercamp sounds like it would be a blast)
cushychicken 5y ago
Thanks for starting hackaday, Phil. Has made for great reading for me for many years, from a no-nothing kid in the aughts to a professional EE now.
seg_lol 5y ago
Are they going to support their maker/hacker ecosystem with versions of their EDA tools? To support things like Efabless [1] and the Skywater PDK with commercial grade tooling would be awesome. What is their long term vision for how this acquisition fits into the rest of their electronics and engineering portfolio? https://www.efabless.com/open_shuttle_program https://www.efabless.com/open_shuttle_program
dlsa 5y ago
I'm actually more interested in how you started hackaday and the story behind it. Early years up to now. Cheers!

michaelt 5y ago

I suspect hobby electronics has faced stiff competition from hobby computing, among people inclined towards tinkering. The people who, in the 1980s might have been using a 555 timer to blink an LED? These days they've got a computer, and they're making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript. Oh sure, a few of them might get an Arduino and blink an LED from time to time - but nowhere near enough to support high street component stores. Of course, from a certain perspective hobby electronics has never been better. Component stockists with huge ranges and fast, cheap shipping? Professionally produced PCBs for $5 including shipping? Microcontrollers with built-in wifi for $1? And the compilers and dev tools are all free? Some of these things have never been better :)

caf 5y ago
The PCB thing is huge. Back in the 90s I was carefully tracing out circuits with a resist pen, etching them with a ferric chloride bath and hand-drilling the component holes. Not only was this extremely finicky and time-consuming, it was expensive! I only ever made a handful of boards of my own design.
mjevans 5y ago
I haven't tried making a PCB for over a decade. $5 PCBs sound great, but what might appeal to me even more is an associated robotic CNC and surface mount service to install all the fiddly stuff and source the 10-50 whatevers of each thing I need from an assembly house's yearly consumption of 5 million Xs. Are there any services like that? Where small runs are possible without the massive cost effect if picking parts that are already in flow?
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  > Are there any services like that? Yes, lots of them. JLPCB even has a promo right now where they do SMT assembly for free. https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/146-2-for-1-4-layer-pcbs https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/146-2-for-1-4-layer-pcbs
vagrantJin 5y ago
> they're making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript. Would rather have more hardware people than software but sadly not the case. Hardware is...well...hard. Automating deployments? eh not so much. This seems to be a general trend where the smart people are gravitating towards "not hard" fields like data science, software and finance. So our houses look like they're straight out of the future retro 60s except for our flat LCD smart TVs and and Alexa pods.

ashtonkem 5y ago

> I suspect that a large chunk of that is money. In particular, the "cost" of things has gone so far down that the money selling those things is a mere pittance of what it was before. But salaries of people to run these businesses, offices, etc hasn't changed. I believe this is a case of "cost disease", when the labor in one sector continues to get more expensive without matching productivity gains.

genmud 5y ago

I am actually not sure I 100% agree with that take on it. I would argue that much of the sales of 1975-1985 places like Radio Shack/Tandy/etc. were around early adopters of home computing. And I would also assume that the vast majority of the sales/items they had were finished projects, not "maker market" type of stuff. Many of the magazines of that era are "how to build $x for your home" or "program $y". I would say that what we are seeing is the market getting much more mature and specialized rather than the makers market going away. I don't think it was ever big enough to be sustainable to begin with, it just so happened that products required bits here and there that those companies had any volume from the general public on maker type of stuff.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
Back in the day (i.e., the period you're talking about!) Radio Shack -- back when their name was two words, rather than "RadioShack" -- sold bare components, breadboards, and IIRC even blank circuit boards, as well as all sorts of textbooks about electronics and various projects. They certainly weren't focused on the "makers' market" but they very explicitly catered to it. And, really, I don't know if there's anything like that today. I'm not sure that a store like the original Radio Shack could exist anymore; I mean, RadioShack may have given up on the space for a reason, indeed the reason that you cite (it wasn't big enough to be sustainable). But that doesn't mean that its departure isn't a genuine void, however small.
- jennasys 5y ago
  For a lucky few, there are a some Micro Center brick & mortar stores around that have a surprisingly up-to-date and diverse selection of electronic components and tools stocked. They are doing what Frys should have done when the market shifted.

kiba 5y ago

Is 33 million dollars of revenue per year considered small?

maxerickson 5y ago
A single fast food place might have several million dollars of revenue.

PavleMiha 5y ago

Purely anecdotally it looks to me that a lot of it moved to (pretty profitable) youtube channels, all the way from Mark Roper, to Applied Science, Simone Giertz, Michael Reeves, etc.

kragen 5y ago
Ben Krasnow and Simone Giertz are pretty great, but they're hackers: the kind of people who used to shop at Radio Shack and read Modern Electronics. There's a world of difference between watching Simone Giertz build hilarious contraptions and building those contraptions yourself. Chuck is saying that 40 years ago there were so many hackers doing these things that there was a whole workforce—partly, but not entirely, a hacker workforce—selling them what they needed for their arcane hobbies. And that, today, there isn't. You seem to suggest that average teenage wankers watching Simone Giertz's escapades is roughly equivalent to 01980s hackers buying transistors at Radio Shack to build a walkie-talkie out of. They aren't. Watching a video of someone doing something is completely different from doing it yourself.
- rasz 5y ago
  Whole workforce supplying hackers is still here and thriving, its just based in Shenzhen.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Shenzhen (and Taipei, Wuxi, etc.) supplies the electronics for the entire world economy, which it turns out is mostly boring incompetent greyface stuff like General Motors and Cemex. They supply hackers too, but hackers are a minority of their customer base. Shenzhen's customer base isn't comparable to that of Radio Shack or Byte.
    - rasz 5y ago
      I dont understand your argument. People named Ralph are the minority of Walmart customers, therefore .. ?? The difference between eighties and now is in the eighties corporations wouldnt even talk to you, so you had to go to RadioShacks, hamventions, or live near Akihabara Electric Town. Nowadays random hacker has access to whole planets supply chain with overnight shipping and websites taking orders 24/7.

spoonjim 5y ago

I disagree with your take on the "makers" market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985. Yes, there are no "brick and mortar" stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don't need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Radioshack -- it's not like you need to physically inspect a 555 timer to gain any information about it before you buy it, like you would with a winter jacket. The only thing lost is the ability to get a part today which sometimes sucks but that's life. We don't need 6 magazines anymore because people put their code on Github and their projects on YouTube, and for free. Profits in the industry are probably lower but that's because there's more competition from other vendors and from people just sharing this stuff with no profit motive, which maybe sucks for the industry but is fantastic for the hobbyists of limited means. Today, hobbyist makers are building stuff that actually does something useful, that has no commercial substitute. With Github, YouTube, forums, people are inspiring each other to make more interesting things than in 1985. Back in 1985 people were usually building stuff that could be bought. Today people are building stuff that can't be bought, and if there's enough of a market for it they productize it with Kickstarter or Tindie. People are sharing code and board designs and projects, and whether at the high end like Mark Rober or the low end like some guy's homebrewing controller the maker world is really bursting with success.

kragen 5y ago
I think this is right. In 01980 you needed a lot of people working on a magazine and buying ads in it to get Don Lancaster's columns out to the teeming unwashed masses. Now Don just posts them on https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu21.shtml#05.23.21 and he can publish lots more than he ever could back in the newsprint days. (The only loss is that he could use a proofreader.) I don't know how much Don spends on hosting† to make everything he's ever written instantly available to every hacker in the whole world but I'm guessing it's about US$100 a month. Inflation-adjusted, that's probably less than Popular Electronics Magazine spent running the office coffeepot. Not counting the price of the coffee. He's written about the days Chuck is—wrongly, I think—eulogizing in https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf. The objective we should measure ourselves against is not the headcount in retail sales (though Amazon seems to have a workforce of substantial size) or the number of inkstains on people's hands; it's access to knowledge and tools, and the power to create that access unlocks. It's people dreaming of wonderful things that never were, and making them real. It's human flourishing. So, how are we doing on that? ______ † Unlike people who just host on GitHub, who depend on Microsoft's continued goodwill to foot their publishing bill, Don hosts his own pages.

antattack 5y ago

Hobbyist money is still flowing, but most of it goes directly to China.

adolph 5y ago

I don’t think this is universally right about brick and mortar. I don’t remember MicroCenter having a RadioShack-like section before but it is there now with a bunch of Adafruit, Raspberry, Pimori, BBC Microbit, etc. In a large metro like Houston, there are also local stores like EPO and regional chains like Altex. I can see how smaller metro areas can’t support the same actual stores as before, but online serves the long tails of specialized demand and supply better anyway. https://epohouston.com/ https://epohouston.com/ https://www.altex.com/Tech-Supplies/Electronic-Parts/Mechanical-Switches https://www.altex.com/Tech-Supplies/Electronic-Parts/Mechani...

rm445 5y ago

Just to shout out that Raspberry Pi Press produce some excellent print magazines, albeit very beginner-focused. Whether they'd be a profitable standalone business I don't know, but as a whole the Raspberry Pi operation seems to be very successful.

CamperBob2 5y ago
Also: what's Circuit Cellar, chopped liver? Circuit Cellar is an excellent print magazine, easily on par with the best of those available in the 1980s and earlier.

peterburkimsher 5y ago

"There are NO brick and mortar retail components stores" - unless you live in Shenzhen (Huaqiangbei), Tokyo (Akihabara), Taipei (Guanghua), or Kaohsiung (Changmingjie). Electronics is one of the things I miss most about living there. The air pollution was terrible though. New Zealand has great air, a good second-hand market (2014 Retina MacBook Pro for 300 USD), but 1-2 months shipping does slow down my hobby electronics. Jaycar, PBTech, JB HiFi have a few common items, but nothing like I could get in China, Japan, or Taiwan. It makes me think twice before buying gadgets though, which might be a good thing!

rasz 5y ago
There used to be a great Electronics Open Air Marked in Poland. Over 100 tents and permanent shops open every weekend. http://www.wolumen.com.pl/index.php?page=infogielda http://www.wolumen.com.pl/index.php?page=infogielda Nowadays there are probably 20 electronics shops remaining, the rest is occupied by grocery/meat/fresh produce suppliers. You can see how it evolved in Street View switching camera between 2009-2017 footage. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wolumen+53,+01-912+Warszawa/@52.2861188,20.9374574,3a,75y,125.46h,99.25t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sFyxh65BYG97tjZCrCmS9uQ!2e0!5s20170801T000000!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x471eca2de7931387:0xbe0e2e10022a4164!8m2!3d52.2856059!4d20.9393039 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wolumen+53,+01-912+Warszaw...

roland35 5y ago

Do you think some sort of automated storefronts could replace the old hardware stores like RadioShack? I would love to have a place I could drive to and pick up some components that I need TODAY, and I always thought a giant vending machine might be good for that!

phendrenad2 5y ago
There isn't a single electronics store in the SF Bay Area where you can drive up, walk down a row of capacitors, and find one that isn't (1) holdover stock from the 1980s or (2) a no-name capacitor brand that will fail to deliver on it's specifications. And even the stores with 1980s holdover stock or bottom-barrel crapware are going away. People would rather just wait 2-4 days for Amazon or even wait 10 days for Mouser/DK. It's that bad. I think there's a sweet spot where a brick and mortar store can sell components. In fact I think the potential there is huge. It'll have to do a lot of things exactly right: 1) Knowledgeable, non-snooty staff who can answer a question quickly and effectively. "My daughter is making an LED circuit" "Okay, LED kit is here, buy some roughly 330 ohm resistors here, these LEDs can't handle 3v directly so they need something to take up the overage, thank you, next customer" 2) Sell parts people want. If your warehouse is full of parts made in 1982 that should fill you with existential dread. Scour Amazon and ebay for electronics parts to determine what is popular. Follow maker sites to determine what parts people are using in hobby projects. 3) Resist the urge to sell high-margin items like phones, Remote-control cars, casio keyboards, or to start your own line of personal computers. That's what did Radio Shack in. You can get such things cheaper online, and no one needs a casio keyboard TODAY the way they need a handfull of 470mocrofarad capacitors TODAY.
- iancmceachern 5y ago
  What about Jameco?

phendrenad2 5y ago

The "makers market" works just fine if you're selling Arduinos from China. The rest, all of it, adafruit, sparkfun, hackaday, supplyframe, tindie, all seem to have been acquired based on user count. I don't think Supplyframe or Siemens has any idea how to monetize them, but maybe there are juicy sales leads to discover in the userbase. Probably not, but you never know.

ptorrone 5y ago
adafruit was not sold to siemens

LegitShady 5y ago

meanwhile I just bought a handful of 600mhz Teensy 4.1s a little while back for ~$25 USD that I never saw an ad for. I have a drawer full of raspberry pis and arduinos. I can program them on my normal computer with very little risk. There are lots of parts available from adafruit/digikey/newark/etc etc. It already comes with a lot of libraries etc done and there are many more on github. So I guess it depends on the tradeoff. Magazines and magazine ads didn't survive the internet intact anywhere in any industry. They're all dying. That isn't special for electronics - its because its easier and cheaper on the internet, and more people will see it. And they don't need to be a radio shack enterprise, because they aren't doing what radio shack did. Radio shack went out of business.

zargon 5y ago

Nobody subscribes to magazines today. The entire consumer electronics market today can barely support one and a half brick and mortar chains (Best Buy and Micro Center). Yet I can get commercially produced PCBs of my own design for less than the cost of the box it will go in. Information is more accessible than ever. Anyone can set up a web store and sell their creations. Markets are different than they were in the '80s.

IgorPartola 5y ago

There are loads of YouTube channels dedicated to 3D printing alone. These are full time jobs for a number of people, and I bet there are more of them than there were employees at the six magazines. There may not be a Radio Shack that sells you gear but there certainly factories and online stores dedicated to maker spaces. Triangle Labs, Big Tree Tech, Prusa, Monoprice, JLCPCB, just to name a small handful of the ones I’ve interacted with recently. And the amount of stuff you can do today is staggering vs even a few years ago. You might be seeing the situation through nostalgia goggles.

TYPE_FASTER 5y ago

I really miss Byte [0]. It covered a wide range of computing, from Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar [1], to my introduction to hypertext. It was great to read the in-depth reviews of both products [2] and technologies, and get an understanding of what was going on in the tech world. [0] - https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?tab=collection https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?tab=collection [1] - https://circuitcellar.com/ https://circuitcellar.com/ [2] - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/013-end-of-the-beginning https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/013-end-of...