> but you can't make the circuit board yourself True. Thankfully, they have become dirt cheap. I can design and push a button to order a multilayer board from

> but you can't make the circuit board yourself True. Thankfully, they have become dirt cheap. I can design and push a button to order a multilayer board from China, which is going to be done by the same industrial processes as any commercial boards, and will even be tested for me. I don't have to worry that I left it etching for too long. Or drilling holes. Or silk screening text. All that, and shipping costs more than the board. > I suspect a lot of would-have-tinkereds give up when they take apart their x with a screw driver and can't figure out what anything is I suspect your memory is playing tricks with you (as it does with everybody). Open an old CRT monitor and you won't know what anything is. Sure, you may learn what the individual components are, but you need a lot of schematic study to even understand what all those components are even doing. Today, we can just open a phone and go "oh, that's the wifi chip". It is still possible to do SMD work at home. Air rework stations have dropped from 4 digit dollars to 2 digits. Other tools are getting cheaper too. Oscilloscopes have never been cheaper (and, if you don't need anything fancy, at least in the US there's a flood of perfectly good used models). Microcontrollers are incredibly cheap. A lot of what was done by hardware today can be handled with software. With <$1 parts. 3d printing allows us to not have to drill soap containers for our electronics cases. Also, all those old electronics magazines? Most of those circuits can be built today just fine. People dabbling in electronics were always a small subset of the population. I am willing to bet that, percentage wise, those numbers are way bigger today.