[nwallin]

Yeah I had kind of a weird reaction to his comment.

I was inspired by Ben Eater's YouTube series about making a breadboard computer. Rather than copying his schematics, I designed my own. Took a very long time. Went on digikey and Amazon and dropped probably around $1k in parts and tools. Now I'm building the damn thing and it's very time consuming.

I also recently bought a new laptop for $200 which is many orders of magnitude more capable than my breadboard computer eventually will be. Does that fact mean my time, effort, and money spent on the breadboard computer is a waste? Hell no.

[stephen_g]

I think that just proves his point. You're spending time doing the parts of the project that interests you.

Manufacturing PCBs isn't electrical engineering, it's process engineering. I'm sure there are some process-engineering hobbyists, so if people want to spend their time doing that, then cool. But his point is that if it's the electronic engineering part you're interested in, spending a lot of time tweaking and improving your DIY PCB manufacturing when you can order dirt cheap boards from China that arrive in less than two weeks, that are far and away better than what you could do at home, that generally isn't worth it.

[dwild]

> Does that fact mean my time, effort, and money spent on the breadboard computer is a waste? Hell no.

Well you did spent $1k in parts and tools instead of building theses parts and tools yourself, didn't you? His argument wasn't that it's not worth the experience, in fact he even mention how the experience can be worth it if that's what you want to experience. If your goal is just to get a PCB, then paying for a professionally made PCB will worth it (just like in your case spending $1k in parts and tools will worth it).