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DEL.ICIO.USConstructing a future with a soldering iron
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My interest in technology started before I was a teen. A friend’s father had a small electronics plant and I would sometimes be allowed to take home discarded components. Then, at 13, I became a ham radio operator - running a small 75-watt station and using Morse Code to talk to other amateur radio operators at a rate that seldom exceeded five words a minute.
In those days a lot of the equipment I used in that radio station was either assembled from kits or created with the components I was given at the electronics plant.
Creating something - whether it is a painting, a deck in your backyard or some archane bit of ham radio equipment - teaches you how things work in a really practical way. You may not understand all the fancy theory but you get an intuitive sense of how things work.
Electronics kits were popular gifts back in those ancient times. HeathKit and other companies offered easy-to-assemble kits (well they were supposed to be easy anyway) for very little money. That sort of thing isn’t as popular anymore.
In fact, I remember - a few years back - visiting the computer science department at a major university (not Georgia Tech by the way). One of the professors told me that most of the gear used in that lab was now assembled by paid technicians. He said that work had once been done by graduate students but - as he put it - “it’s hard to find one now who knows that it’s best to grab the cold end of a soldering iron.”
His view - and I don’t know enough about the graduate student scene to know if it is true or not - was that students loved to write software but didn’t enjoy messing with hardware very much. If that’s right, then there are some real opportunities for students who enjoy the hardware side of electronics.
One way to encourage that would be to give them an electronic kit to assemble. There still are companies out there that offer these kids. I’ll link to one that I have used and know to be honest.
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