39C3 Building Hardware Talk

A nice talk by Kliment at 39CC showed up in my feed recently: Building hardware - easier than ever - harder than it should be. I thought that the speaker did a good job of summarizing what has changed in this space in the last decade or so, and how amazing that is when it comes to making DIY electronics acccessible.

A few of the things that Kliment touched on:

• Parts are cheap - microelectronics has long exploited economies of scale; old nodes still produce useful components; more integrated functionality
• Distributors make those parts accessible - example: DigiKey (it used to be small dusty stores for discretes and trying to sample parts from big suppliers to get them in low quantities).
• PCB manufacturing costs have decreased by an order of magnitude - this is still the one that impresses me the most: these are custom fabricated components in single digit quanitites delivered across an ocean for about $2/ea. The level of automation in the production and logistics must be incredible.
• Open source software makes design accessible - it's also difficult to overstate how important and amazing this is. KiCad is an invaluable tool: functionality, comprehensive library, and an architecture that's compatible with version control and data portability.

Hopefully this environment does help advance the idea that anyone who wants to make something electronic their own feels confident that they can.