| ??? 02/21/11 12:24 Read: times |
#181206 - Re: the hobbyist connection Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Peters said:
Do you mean sales of DIP parts is substantially (completely?) to hobbyists, or sales of their entire micro line? One suspects that the hobbyist sales are a rounding error compared to the production quantities being sold to OEMs. Seeing as I would also count engineers who also engage in hobby-scale activities (EEs can also take their passions home and annoy the missus, you know ;-)) merely saying that it might add up to something i.e. total DIP+SMT hobbyist sales. On orders of up to a few hundreds at a time, their per-unit margin would be significantly higher than for say, a 100K OEM order(??) Still, would be interesting to know nonetheless.. Andy Peters said:
There is a school of thought that says, "get the young hobbyist interested in a component/software package/brand of pencil as a student, and he/she will prefer to use that $THING when hired into a professional gig." That might be somewhat true, but once the new engineer is confronted with any of several realities ("those parts are too expensive"/"they are not a preferred supplier for $ARBITRARY reason" etc) that goes out the window. Agree 100%. I seem to recall when I first left technical college after completing my (8088-based) final-year-project. Problem came when I started looking for work and was given similar responses by prospective employers "Oh, we use the Z80 here. Sorry!". Guess which was cheaper and more readily available from any retail electronics store at that time (mid-1994)? Fast forward to 2007, I found myself in exactly the same scenario. This time however I was lucky, because by then I had worked with every other popular micro architecture except what they were using! Andy Peters said:
And one suspects that the non-student hobbyist market (meaning, "adults who are not working EEs") is completely uninteresting to a semiconductor vendor because those hobbyists will never buy enough parts to matter. Jeez, if you peruse the various DIY electronics forums (good for a laugh), you'll see a lot of threads about, "Want free parts? Go to ti.com and request samples!" Only they aren't exactly free.. Since most of those parts (their standard logic/linear stuff excluded) aren't available in DIP, unwary hobbyists are either forced to buy an SMT-to-DIL adapter PCBs or make their own. Note to hobbyists; nothing's free! :-P Andy Peters said:
I am all for people playing with electronics as a hobby. I just don't expect the semiconductor vendors to care enough to cater to that market. As an engineer working for a small OEM, we really don't have much influence on commodity ICs and we have to just take what we can get. This reality might be why I'm always amused by the hobbyist crowd's absurd demands. For those demanding hobbyists out there with deep pockets, there's always the option of having their own custom silicon made and packaged in a nice, ceramic DIP with gold-plated pins. This ensures they get (almost) exactly what they want every time.. Regards, Valentin Angelovski |
