Is the age of Electronics as a hobby falling down?!

[wizard]

I like electronics than anything else and I don't know why , may be i like the shapes of the electronic components may be their smell. But every time i make a circuit for hobby I feel happy like never before..

I am happy of hearing that.

I also was very happy 10-12 years ago when I tried to design/make a circuit (I was a 19-21 yeras old guy at that time), But today i don't feel happy anymore! I just feel happy if and only if the thing I am designing is a NEW thing, nowadays I just like to be able to invent new electronic stuff!

 

[wizard]

No one’s asked the question “What in the world is Ion Deposition and why do you need it for printing?”.

Let me explain. In order to understand how Ion Deposition works, you have to know a bit about how laser printers work. Briefly, a metal drum is coated with silicone so that it makes a diode between the drum and an electric charge placed evenly on the surface. The diode blocks the charge from flowing to the metal drum which can be at ground potential. When a laser is made to shine on the surface of the drum, the diode breaks down and the charge at that laser spot is bled off to ground. The toner, which is kept at the same charge potential as the unaffected regions of the drum, transfers to the areas that were discharged forming an image of the text or picture. As the drum turns, the toner is then transferred with another charge to the paper that is going through the printer. The paper continues on to a fuser which melts the toner into the paper fibers making the image. The drum is then cleaned of the excess toner and recharged in preparation for another image.

In ion deposition printers the drum is also made of an aluminum extrusion but has a much thicker wall. The drum surface is not coated with silicone but is anodized forming a layer of oxide that is very resistant to abrasion. It is treated with wax to seal any pores in the crystalline structure of the oxide layer.

The “head” which generates the ions is a laminated structure similar to a multi-layer printed circuit board. Starting off with an insulator, the metal layer is made of stainless steel and etched into parallel control tracks (16 or more) along the length of the printed circuit board which can be 15” long. Next, a mica layer of precise thickness is glued down onto the control tracks. Another layer of stainless steel is etched and deposited on top of the mica layer in the shape of small tuning forks (call them fingers) and brought out to the sides of the printed circuit board where contacts with the electronics can me made. Then another insulating layer is applied and the final stainless steel layer is glued on that has small holes at the intersection of the control tracks with the fingers (call it the grid layer). When a high voltage and high frequency AC (around 2000 V) is applied to a control line (one at a time) a corona discharge is created along the length of the control line and fingers and just below the small holes of the grid layer. The grid layer is held at a potential that prevents the ions from escaping through the holes. The electronics then biases the fingers to the same potential as the grid layer and allows the ions to project through the holes depositing them on the drum that is rotating closely to the head. The ions stick to the drum. The scanning of the control lines and the fingers is performed by the electronics to form a charge image on the drum as it rotates below the head.

The toner roll is also an aluminum cylinder that has a permanent magnet inside. A hopper holds the toner which is in a powder form above the roll. A gate shaves off the precise thickness of the toner that is held to the drum by magnetic attraction and forms a bristle-like brush. The toner particles flip many times as the aluminum drum rotates over the fixed magnet inside and encounters north and south poles. The “brush” is located almost touching the drum. When charged areas on the drum pass close to the toner brush, particles of toner are adhered to the charge. The drum then has an image of the text or picture in toner as it revolves further toward the paper.

Since the drum is very hard and impervious to abrasion, it can be used effectively to transfer the toner to the paper by cold pressure fusing. A plastic roll below the imaging drum is made to bear on it at high pressure. The paper is fed into the “nip” between the two rollers. The plastic drum (a little secret) is skewed just slightly to the center line of the imaging roller causing it to bend, like two pieces of rope twisted together and, create a uniform pressure along the contact zone. The toner is transferred and fused at the same time by the generated heat of the pressure applied and the sliding that goes on between the two rollers due to the skew. Very little toner remains on the drum. The drum is cleaned by a knife scraping the remains into a little removable bucket for cleaning. Then the drum is erased of any remaining charge by a corona discharge wire and is ready for the next image.

You might ask what are the advantages and disadvantages of the two competing technologies. Ion deposition imaging quality is slightly lower than laser due to the many sources of ion “jets” making the image. They make dots of slightly different size and deteriorate unevenly. The laser uses a single source of light for every part of the drum placing precisely the same size dot across the entire image. As the laser degrades, the image fades as a whole and is not noticeable. However, the image quality of ion deposition is still acceptable for uses where impact printers were once the only technology available. The speed of imaging far exceeds that of the laser and the simplicity of the mechanism and the robustness of the printing engine makes it a good choice in these applications. The printing head uses the same manufacturing processes used in printed circuit manufacturing and is well understood. It is made such that the user can easily replace it when the print quality degrades sufficiently usually after a hundred thousand sheets of paper have gone through the printer. The drum lasts over a million sheets. When you calculate the cost per page including all of the consumables and compare them against the laser, you find that the cost of ion deposition is one tenth the cost of the laser. This is a significant cost saving for a large volume printing company.

The engine, however, is not the complete story in making a high speed printer. You also need to feed a large quantity of cut sheet paper into it and stack the paper into a neat pile as it comes out.

What has this to do with electronics? I say don’t limit yourself to one discipline… electronics and mechanics are closely linked in industry. You must be able to speak the language of both to make it in the industrial world.

Thanks again Val, for your long and very helpful post. you are a very wise man like most of other friends here in this forum.

 

[wizard]

It’s time to get back on topic: electronics as a hobby.

From the time I was born in 1942 until about 1955, the only “electronics” in the house was a telephone and a tube radio. In 1955 we added a tube television (a Sylvania TV with fluorescent light surrounding the picture tube). It broke down often and I remember having to replace the picture tube and the many vacuum tubes located in the chassis. The local drug store carried all the vacuum tube types and had a self service tube tester where you could check them yourself.

I began my interest in electronics as a hobby around 1955 when I acquired a tube amplifier and a speaker in a primitive cabinet. I went to Electro Sonic (a local electronics store) and bought a simple record player turntable with an automatic changer. I connected all of these components together learning about the requirements for coaxial cable and other necessities. Very quickly afterwards the transistor took over and eventually completely eliminated the vacuum tube.

At that time in history, I was able to buy a magazine called Popular Electronics that had many DIY articles in it. I started to tinker with those construction plans and carried on building projects throughout my high-school days. I remember building a megaphone to use at football games and make my shouts heard over everyone else. At University of Toronto where I studied Electrical Engineering, we had a physics professor named John Bird (https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2013/07/bio_John20Bird.pdf). He was the national car rally champion having won the Canadian Winter Rally a number of times. Some of the guys and I set up a car rally of our own and got John Bird to check it out for accuracy. I surprised everyone in the class one day by bringing in a computer I had built to help my driver and I in winning the rally. It was an analog computer that had 3 rotary switches where you could enter the miles per hour you were supposed to drive to 1 decimal point (i.e. – 36.6 mph). When the computer was started, it would advance a mechanical counter every 1/10 of a mile. All the driver had to do was keep the car’s odometer in step with the counter on the computer and the car was on time. When you entered a check point with your score card, you had to be no more than +/- one minute out from the calculated time or lose a point for each minute over or under. John Bird navigated across Canada from coast to coast and only had 6 points against him. On the actual rally the computer made no difference. My driver got stuck in a snow bank that was as high as the roof of the car and we lost the rally. Cost me a case of beer on a bet that we would win.

Electronics as a hobby is nowhere near dead! You can still get DIY magazines such as Circuit Cellar and Elektor although they are heavily geared to digital electronics and microprocessors.

Why not start where it all began: vacuum tubes. A friend of mine in Florida restored an old car from the late 1940s and drove a group of us to lunch in it. He turned on the car radio and out came music from the 1940s. I was thinking at the time “What station would be playing this kind of music in this day and age”? I then figured out that my friend had made a radio transmitter and had it hidden in the trunk of the car that played pre-recorded music from that era.

One of my favorite songs is Radio Ga Ga by Queen. Radio still intrigues me since it’s like fishing for a weak signal in an environment polluted by radio noise. When you can select the signal you are interested in, it’s like having hooked a large fish on your line.

There are many articles on the Internet showing how to construct a vacuum tube radio transmitter for the AM band. Why not start with a project like that and enjoy some history in the process. You can load your iPod with old shows from an era gone by such as Abbott and Costello and The Shadow and amaze your friends when you play them on your AM radio. You can get into restoring old tube radios as a hobby. Check out the Internet. There are many people already doing this and making a huge profit by selling these restored radios. I bought one myself for $300.

If you prefer a kit, you can construct a guitar amplifier from the following vendor:
https://tubedepot.com/

Thanks Val For this post as well,

When I was reading your post, I rememberd something.
Did you notice that these days some new stuff/devices come up which have a "body" like their old fathers!? It is interseting that people would like to make the past alive by doing so and the customers are glad as well by buying & using those stuffs!
Yes as I told before, I am agreed that electronics as hobby is falling down, But what can we do so that do not be disappointment, Specially if we have put our life on it? aren't we able to change the situation somehow? For instance by trying to start a group to do "new" things related to electonics? What the scientists try to do in the universities or in the labs? They are designing/creating/improving new electronics stuff as well. Why we should not choice something like that as a hobby?

Even sometimes we can be creative by doing simple tasks which nobody thought about before!I remember a guy who created 4 separate electronics "blades" which you could very simply connect them to evrything (like to your keyboard or to a dish in a minute!!!) and cause them to flight! lol

 

[wizard]

Hi Wizard. The above quote hits me "close to home". Could you please elaborate if possible
You see I also have "invented" a small analog design trick someone else should have thought up years ago. It makes any garden variety op-amp do something almost unbelievable. It is so simple, most of you advanced designers will probably respond: "Doh! That is so simple. I wonder why nobody ever did that before!"

I plan to start a thread about this in the Electronics Design section of this board, but I'll wait for your reply first. I have absolutely no idea how I could possibly profit from this idea, let alone start a company.

Hello Bob,

I sent you a PM.
I'll send you another one with a link.

Wow, I am very surprised. Plaese kindly inform me when you'll start the said thread.
To let you know a point, most of the times you can try to search an idea in the pattent websites with your kyewords to see if it has been done before or not. you even can get the PDF files of the new invents via those websites and try to improve them if you think you can! This way you can be an inventor as well.

 

[jpanhalt]

Somewhat like Val, I grew up in the 1950's, remember those old tube testers, and got involved in electronics, but that involvement was for my main hobby, RC model airplanes. I certainly remember Popular Electronics.

Anyway, I was surprised the other day when looking for sale merchandise at Hobby King when an electronics starter kit popped up:
https://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking...nal_LCD_Display_Electronics_Training_Kit.html

As one comment noted, it doesn't have wings, so why was it there? Maybe it is a good sign that Asian manufacturers have seen a need to fill a gap with cost effective alternatives. Radio Shack has been selling Asian-manufactured merchandise for as Long as I can remember. Now, you can get a serial display, MCU, breadboard, and more for not much more than Radio Shack sells the display alone.

John

 

[fezder]

I will try to start a new thread in this section to see if we can contribute to do something against it (at least for ourselves!)!!!

that sound very cool!

 

[bryan]

I don't think electronics as a hobby as dwindled, just a different landscape, all one has to look at is the explosion of the Arduino. Sure it's programming, but a good part of the platform is not just the programming aspect but the building of projects using discrete components and modules. Starting to see the same thing with the Raspberry PI.

 

[misterT]

I did'nt read through all the post, but I think that the mentality used to be: "this is the future".. and now, for hobbyists, it is more like "how can I ever catch up with this technology".

But, I think that for hobbyists it is not about technology (manufacturing), it is about inventing and solving problems. Prototypes are not meant to be pretty.. they are supposed to work.. plain and simple. If it works, then there is somebody who will pay to make it look pretty.

 

[wizard]

Good hobbies are good because they give the participant enjoyment, not because they are popular. A decline (assuming that it is truly happening) in electronics would be no different that various other activities that have seen decline, but still have a solid base of loyal enthusiasts. Let's use the example of traditional archery as a hobby. The bow and arrow has long been replaced by guns, and even archery has had advancements with compound bows that are far superior to the old traditional longbows and recurve-bows of the past. Yet, there are avid participants in traditional archery that prefer to do things in the old style.

Similarly, you can still find musicians that specialize in old instruments like the harpsichord and the lute, which have long been replaced and are no longer popular.

How long has it been since the longbow and the lute were at their peak? It's been hundreds and hundreds of years, but the hobbies are still alive and well.

There will always be people making crystal radios for the same reasons that people study ancient weapons and music. There is no better way to understand a highly advanced field than by tracing back to it's roots, and simplicity is often more enjoyable than complexity when you are trying to relax with a hobby. There is also the element of traveling back in time, in some sense, when you do these types of activities. There are still people working with tubes, although tubes are almost obsolete now. Even if tubes become unavailable, I think people would make their own and still experiment. It will be a long time before any person can't buy a few resistors, caps, coils and transistors and make a basic audio amplifier or AM transmitter with receiver.

Believe me, things will decline, if not now then someday, but it will never die.

Thanks Steve For your post,

Well, to be honnest, as I mentioned Somehow In my previse posts the Electronic devices are going to be much more advanced/Popular than the past, so can potentially cause the PLEASURE of a hobby start to be much more less than before. I am not able to imagine what will happen in the next decades if the train of the technology movies with this increasing speed, So I am worried about putting my life in something for almost nothing (Ie be sad at the end of my way!)!!

And yes Always there are people who like to work/play with ancient things, but I don't think they are in majority after a decline If you know what I mean?...

 

[killivolt]

Hi Wizard. The above quote hits me "close to home". Could you please elaborate if possible
You see I also have "invented" a small analog design trick someone else should have thought up years ago. It makes any garden variety op-amp do something almost unbelievable. It is so simple, most of you advanced designers will probably respond: "Doh! That is so simple. I wonder why nobody ever did that before!"

I plan to start a thread about this in the Electronics Design section of this board, but I'll wait for your reply first. I have absolutely no idea how I could possibly profit from this idea, let alone start a company.

Bob, please post a link here to the "Thread"

Wizard, if you can and it doesn't happen. Please, put it here. I'm not always able to be by a computer reading "ETO" I would very much like to read it.

Thank you,
kv

 

[wizard]

Bob, please post a link here to the "Thread"

Wizard, if you can and it doesn't happen. Please, put it here. I'm not always able to be by a computer reading "ETO" I would very much like to read it.

Thank you,
kv

Hi killivolt,

Don't worry Buddy, I'll PM you.