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Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

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Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#131

Post by tonyarkles »

skybrian wrote: post #99
ta988 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you get it fast, with service and no random customs problems. Sometimes for things that don't scale ($20 vs $10 one time) it may not matter much for some.

I assume Adafruit is fast for people on the east coast or if you pay a lot for shipping. I looked into Adafruit's west coast distributors but they only have a few of their products. (Jameco carries some Adafruit stuff but typically not what I'm looking for.)

Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#132

Post by mjevans »

michaelt wrote: post #65
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

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…

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?

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#133

Post by chipotle_coyote »

genmud wrote: post #69
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

I am actually not sure I 100% agree with that take on it. I would argue that much of the sales of 1975-1985 places like Radio Shack/Tandy/etc. were around early adopters of home computing. And I would also assume that the vast majority of the sales/items they had were finished projects, not "maker market" type of stuff. Many of the magazines of that era are "how to build $x for your home" or "program $y". I would say…

Back in the day (i.e., the period you're talking about!) Radio Shack -- back when their name was two words, rather than "RadioShack" -- sold bare components, breadboards, and IIRC even blank circuit boards, as well as all sorts of textbooks about electronics and various projects. They certainly weren't focused on the "makers' market" but they very explicitly catered to it.

And, really, I don't know if there's anything like that today. I'm not sure that a store like the original Radio Shack could exist anymore; I mean, RadioShack may have given up on the space for a reason, indeed the reason that you cite (it wasn't big enough to be sustainable). But that doesn't mean that its departure isn't a genuine void, however small.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#134

Post by skybrian »

tonyarkles wrote: post #131
skybrian wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Adafruit is fast for people on the east coast or if you pay a lot for shipping. I looked into Adafruit's west coast distributors but they only have a few of their products. (Jameco carries some Adafruit stuff but typically not what I'm looking for.)

Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.

Yeah, that's nice. Digikey is in Minnesota so I assume that helps for some parts of Canada. It looks like it's only free for orders above $100?

Amazon is worth a look too, particularly for Prime users.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#135

Post by JKCalhoun »

spoonjim wrote: post #77
ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

I disagree with your take on the "makers" market. The maker world is far more interesting today than in 1985. Yes, there are no "brick and mortar" stores because in 1985, brick and mortar was the only type of store that existed. Nowadays, Internet shopping is so developed that Adafruit, Sparkfun, Digi-Key, etc. don't need brick and mortar stores. The experience of shopping for parts online is much better than at a Ra…

Agree. This is a golden age for makers — at least electronics, software makers — perhaps others.

Professional looking PCB's, inexpensive components direct from China ... all within the hobbyists reach.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#136

Post by IgorPartola »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #55

This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…

There are loads of YouTube channels dedicated to 3D printing alone. These are full time jobs for a number of people, and I bet there are more of them than there were employees at the six magazines. There may not be a Radio Shack that sells you gear but there certainly factories and online stores dedicated to maker spaces. Triangle Labs, Big Tree Tech, Prusa, Monoprice, JLCPCB, just to name a small handful of the ones I’ve interacted with recently. And the amount of stuff you can do today is staggering vs even a few years ago.

You might be seeing the situation through nostalgia goggles.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#137

Post by kragen »

mjevans wrote: post #130
kragen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're saying that new hackers don't have a good place to go for reliable information, and in the 01980s they did, because magazines and books were reliable, and now they're gone? And that it's harder to get electronic parts now than it was in the 01980s? I think I disagree with both of these. But I'll only tackle the first one. With respect to reliability of information, I agree there's an enormous am…

I respect your idea of trying to make dates valid for 10x the duration of 4 digit dates; however prefix with a leading zero also often implies octal parsing. Current date formats ignore that for fields of fixed with, and make various assumptions in cases of dynamic width. There doesn't appear to be a notation similar to the C style prefixes 0x and 0 (hex and octal), nor like the mentioned assembly language post-fixes…

8 and 9 aren't valid octal digits since C89 :)

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#138

Post by sbierwagen »

jacobolus wrote: post #111
ChuckMcM wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have a valid point but did you experience the "friction free" experience of walking into an electronics store idly and then walking out with all of the parts to build a project that afternoon? Most mixed HW/SW hackers accumulate a "stash" of components, and from that stash one can sometimes build new projects, but for me, there is a huge impediment when I have 90% of the parts and then have to wait for th…

> Kickstarter [...] has put more people into bankruptcy than MLM in my opinion. I don’t understand what this means. The creators of kickstart projects overcommit and then bankrupt themselves trying to fulfill orders? Backers of kickstart projects bankrupt themselves supporting more projects than their financial resources allow?

The Open Locksport kickstarter is one notable disaster: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/schuyler-towne-a... Back in the day there were an endless series of "$100 3d printers". Etc etc.

Adding the required 50% margin to the BOM of a consumer product is painful and unintuitive. Most kickstarters are done by regular people, and as a normal consumer it can be hard to be appropriately pessimistic when pricing a product you have to manufacture and sell. It's endlessly temping to lower the price.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#139

Post by sbierwagen »

mjevans wrote: post #130
kragen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're saying that new hackers don't have a good place to go for reliable information, and in the 01980s they did, because magazines and books were reliable, and now they're gone? And that it's harder to get electronic parts now than it was in the 01980s? I think I disagree with both of these. But I'll only tackle the first one. With respect to reliability of information, I agree there's an enormous am…

I respect your idea of trying to make dates valid for 10x the duration of 4 digit dates; however prefix with a leading zero also often implies octal parsing. Current date formats ignore that for fields of fixed with, and make various assumptions in cases of dynamic width. There doesn't appear to be a notation similar to the C style prefixes 0x and 0 (hex and octal), nor like the mentioned assembly language post-fixes…

Five digit years is a Long Now foundation thing. Saying "it looks like octal" is new to me though.

Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie

#140

Post by sbierwagen »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #72
robert_foss wrote: post #17

That's all very unfortunate. Having worked with German behemoth companies before I can't think of any positive outcomes.

Eh, no need to be that narrow: What fraction of all acquisitions end well for the acquired company? I'm sure it must happen, but (at the risk of availability bias) I can't actually think of any.

Apple buying NeXT worked out pretty well for NeXT. Youtube also seems to be doing well under Google.
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