[michaelt]

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 :)

[mjevans]

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]

> 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

[caf]

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.

[vagrantJin]

> 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.